Lapbert Has Problems

My trusty old Dell laptop (“Lapbert”) seems to have problems. It's PC Card network card can't establish a connection. Worse, I didn't realize that until I entered all this month's invoicing data so that it would be ready for printing and e-mailing. So I now have to redo it all. By hand. Soon.

After I get done with that, I need to figure out how serious the problem is. I hope it isn't too bad.

Mac Woes

I did some work for a friend of mine, the church's choir director, today. I worked on her home wireless network. It would have been fairly simple: wireless router on first floor to iMac with Airport on second floor. Except that her grandson disconnected the cable modem to router connection and hooked it indirectly through another router so that he could get online without waiting for me to finish. I didn't realize it — since the cable modem is actually another floor down and linked by a long ethernet cable — until I had spent probably an hour pulling my hair out.

The grandson had important things to do. Like downloading pirated copies of Zone Alarm Pro, Office and Fahrenheit 9/11 off the new cable connection. sigh

Then Airport wasn't working. Turned out the grandson, who hates Macs, had installed it. He forgot to hook up the internal iMac antennae to the Airport card. I only caught that when I had to remove the card to get the S/N for AppleCare support. I think the technician was glad to see she didn't have to solve the problem for me.

Then the cable modem lost its signal again, thanks to a weak signal. Charter said they'd send out a tech on Friday.

Interspersed there was a lot of time locating and downloading updates — when things were working — onto my PowerBook and then burning them and putting them on the iMac. If Airport had just been installed correctly things would have been way easier: just launch Software Update and get the new Airport and Mac OS updates. But, in the end the computer moved up to OS 9.2 from 9.0 and I convinced my friend that despite the fact that her grandchildren were nagging her to get a PC and that the church office is standardized on XP, that she really wasn't foolish for wanting to stay on Macs.

Now if only the church office would find a budget for a new PowerBook for her…

Plumb Out of Ideas

Well, I was busy all day and then tonight I got to fight with plumbing problems (sewer backing up). It was a real mess, although fortunately it didn't ruin anything, just took awhile to clean up and figure out what was wrong (hopefully). I guess you will just have to wait another painstaking day for my next “real” post.

Sorry to disappoint again!

Tired

I was going to write a nice post, but all of a sudden I feel completely drained and exhausted and I think I will hit the sack instead. Maybe tomorrow…

Dante's Prayer (Lyric)

When the dark wood fell before me / And all the paths were overgrown / When the priests of pride say there is no other way / I tilled the sorrows of stone

I did not believe because I could not see / Though you came to me in the night/ When the dawn seemed forever lost / You showed me your love in the light of the stars

Cast your eyes on the ocean / Cast your soul to the sea / When the dark night seems endless / Please remember me

Then the mountain rose before me / By the deep well of desire / From the fountain of forgiveness / Beyond the ice and fire / Cast your eyes on the ocean / Cast your soul to the sea / When the dark night seems endless / Please remember me

Though we share this humble path, alone / How fragile is the heart / Oh give these clay feet wings to fly / To touch the face of the stars

Breathe life into this feeble heart / Lift this mortal veil of fear / Take these crumbled hopes, etched with tears / We'll rise above these earthly cares

Cast your eyes on the ocean / Cast your soul to the sea / When the dark night seems endless

Please remember me
Please remember me

-Loreena McKennitt

QOTW: Omnipotent You

Here's the oft promised QOTW from David McGlone:

If you could be God for about 5 days, what things would you try to change or accomplish with your life in your 5 days? (this excludes trying to save the world, stop hunger, etc etc. Basically you are God with powers to control your own life and destiny and not be able to change history or fix it before it happens).And if you want, give a brief explanation why you chose the accomplishment or change.

That is TOUGH! OK, I'll admit it, from this standpoint, I'd want to use part of the time to make my life pleasant — I won't pretend I wouldn't want to. Here's the thing though: being God means having three very important qualities. These are:

1. Omnipresent
2. Omnipotent
3. Omniscient

With those in mind, I'd probably use my time much more wisely. Arguably since God created time that would mean that if God handed me His powers for five days I'd also be able to step outside of time and get more done. But, that's aside the point.

So what would I do? Probably cause the clouds to rain properly translated copies of the Bible to all of the people of the earth. I'd also do some miraculous type signs (maybe the sun wouldn't come up one day or the seas would turn to blood one day) to get people's attention. Then I'd use a booming voice to tell everyone to read the book that had hit them in the head to figure out what was going on. Perhaps I'd even provide a few pointers while on the “megaphone.”

Of course, that goes back to that omniscient characteristic. If I truly had the qualities of God, I would do just what God is doing right now because God already knows what is best to do.

Sheesh

I needed to setup a new web hosting account for someone today. Sounds easy enough. Of course all of my welcome message templates were stored in Evolution, which wasn't working (none of GNU/Linux was because I am in the process of reorganizing my disk). So, I had to speed up my reorganization, move 30 GB (or so) back onto GNU/Linux — which took forever even over Fast Ethernet, alas my PC doesn't have Gigabit nor does my router — so that I could get to the mail message. It finally just completed, so I can get that account setup before I go to bed.

Finally.

Late Again

The QOTW is late again, but hopefully I will get it up tomorrow. Sorry for the spree of short posts…

Power to the People

Power has been somewhat elusive around St. Louis since the storm yesterday morning. I lost power from eight in the morning until after three yesterday afternoon, and overall, I seem to be fortunate. At that point 8,500 homes were without power in St. Charles alone. Some estimates I heard put the metro area total at something closer to 90,000 still without power as of this morning.

Traffic has been a mess because of all this. Many traffic signals are still out or are flashing red because of the outages. Long traffic jams were the norm today. And while waiting in traffic, the most common sight seemed to be tons of trees split right down the middle as if a giant axe had split them apart. I saw one tree, apparently uprooted, that looked like it had probably been there for at least 100 years.

Walgreens employees at one area location today could all be seen congregating at the doorway of the closed store since apparently they hadn't been sent home but no business was possible in the store. One of the fireworks vendors, Red Rocket Fireworks (d.b.a. Crazy Dave's Fireworks), apparently lost three of its ten area tents to the storms — destroying all of the remaining inventory at those tents. Today was the day they were suppose to pack up, so the storm came just a bit too soon to avert the loss of the fireworks.

Quite a storm.

Rendezvous with the Desktop

Last week, Apple's Free Software implementation of Rendezvous for POSIX systems was updated. Despite getting some coverage from the GNU/Linux community, do we continue to face a landscape where distributors ignore this great technology as most of them have in the past? Read my take on Rendezvous and its importance to GNU/Linux on the desktop at OfB.