Borklog: One entry

18 January 2003

• I had Jury Duty Jan 6th through the 9th, trying an accident-damages due to a guy running into an 18 wheeler that was straddling the road. He was pretty messed up, but didn't do rehab. We awarded some damages (since liability had already been determined before our trial started), but I think we did Good Justice since both side's attourneys grimaced at the verdict reading. Four days of tedious medical testimony.

• on Tuesday the 7th, WorldCom decided to pull the plug on Digital Mission, where I had my computer colocated. DM had no warning, and my first inkling of problems was not being able to check my email tuesday night. I came to discover that the shut off was sudden and permanent, and I needed a new place to set up shop (which was difficult to do since I was still in the trial during the day.

• The fine folks at Acorn Hosting let us move in on very short notice. Obligations wednesday and thursday night precluded doing much site restoration, outside of slurping over aolserver and figuring out how to get the virtual hosting working so I can put my 5 sites behind one IP, rather than the luxury of several IPs at Digital Mission.

• After delivering the verdict on thursday, I came home (skipping my usual thursday night rehearsal 80 miles away), heated up dinner, and got a call from Sharlotte's aunt saying that Gramma (95 years old) had fallen and couldn't get up. So I headed over there (a couple miles away) to help out. I finally got home from the ER around 1:30 or 2 in the morning.

• and then after that was the slow process of getting sites back up and running. I had a backup from july time frame. I used the time at a WPLUG installfest to get my qmail config back up and running. After that was getting other sites working (specifically the Loudoun Symphony), since there are actual people who use those sites to do Real Stuff. This involved several migrations, AOLserver 2.3.3 -> a more recent version, Oracle -> postgrese. It's not quite finished, but it's at least working

• Oh, in the middle of all of this, my ISP (Alltel) was totally flaking out, somtimes giving me a half dozen disconnects in the course of an hour. That makes things dreadfully difficult to accomplish. I'm also paying a king's ransom for ISDN "service" (since we're too far for DSL, and the cable folks just laugh at us).

• Due to a comedy of errors, I wasn't able to get my physical machine until wednesday evening (1 week, 1 day since the plug got pulled) to get the most recent data. I borrowed a friend's DSL to upload a bunch of stuff the last couple of days, which let me get Borkware and badgertronics back up and running.

• There's still a lot of mop-up left to do (virtual machine configs, figuring out backup strategy, but things should work (all of borkware, badgerblog, sick, and the other random things around here)