Good morning, Netizens...

For the better part of the last three days I have been engaged in what some of my peers might call the eternal trial by fire, as a server hard drive over which I am responsible failed after 3 years, six months and change. What this implies is that for the last 72 hours I have been largely working 16-18 hours per day refitting a new hard drive and performing a restoration process which, fortunately, worked as planned.

There are a lot of people who are attempting to sell backup solutions for computer users, and over the years, I have always stuck with the free solution that has worked so well for everything I do, the Unix “tar” program. As always, the backups it creates worked just fine, and thus for the future, my reputation is secure. (huge sigh of relief) In some cases, it can take days to write a decent tar backup script, but once you have it down pat, you can sleep nights.

Unfortunately, that has left me somewhat distracted from the business of tending the Community Comment, but as of last night I was able to sleep beneath the bar in the Virtual Ballroom, my mind secure and my heart once more beating its normal rhythm. There is nothing like watching a hard disk shred itself to setting your poor heart to pitter-patting like a sparrow wearing tennis shoes on steroids.

Unfortunately, the beautiful warm weather that I occasionally admired out the window while thus engaged in my real day job is going, going gone! Instead we will be seeing possible showers, perhaps even a thunderstorm, and much, much cooler.

I guess I'll put away the Sea-N-Ski lotion for another few weeks.

Dave

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