Good morning, Netizens...

After closely following the misadventures of our own Jeanie of Spokane and her computer meltdown last week perhaps you can imagine how I felt late Saturday when, after over nine continuous years of nonstop service, the primary hard disk on my personal server, the Kharma Lot, melted down and died an ignominious death of non-electronic means. It was, of course, aided along its way to its last revolutions by a cat urinating on an Ethernet cable, thus wiping out not only the server but the uninterruptible power supply as well. In retrospect the only thought that comes to mind is, “Here, kitty, kitty, kitty. Come to daddy...”

Suffice it to say, everything on that hard disk was backed up, and my new server returned in all its illuminating self-fulfilling glory within 4 hours, although some of the web server files have yet to be restored and verified. It is amazing how much digital crap we can accumulate over t he years, and it gets much worse on a server. There were things on that server that date back into the late 1980's, all meticulously backed up in tidy little files for almost a decade. Behold, I rise to the podium of thought and speak with the authority of a jackass and say,“Thank God for good backups and good policies.”

However, if you sent me a nasty gram anytime Saturday or Sunday, and received a tersely-worded message from some dweeb named the MAILER-DAEMON telling you that my system would not relay for you, pour yourself a powder in malted ale and try again. Things are back in some semblance of normalcy, given the ancient age of the equipment, the age of the antique administrator and the jury-rigged hardware, although now we have new software that I can screw up better than my previous attempts.

Look at it this way. I had a standing offer for Saturday evening to attend a dinner engagement with a South Hill political person who shall not be named, a largely-ceremonial duty which I was not particularly looking forward to, given the heat. I will save my rant about politicians, their allies and their social engagements around election time for another day because, due to the hard disk failure, I don't have to invent a fabrication. I was busy. Truth is always a better construct than a poorly-fabricated falsehood, is it not?

Find yourselves a nice cool place from which to observe the passion of the heat today.

Dave

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