No longer Monday

Monday turned into a mental health day - by the time the morning stuff was done and the remainder was done in the afternoon, it was not worth spending two hours to travel downtown and back to work two hours - so it was 8 hours Medical instead of the four that I had planned.

If got cold overnight - it was still motorcycle-warm when I went to bed, and when I got up it was cold enough that I didn't even want to try to start one up.  I am sure that at least one will start - but there wasn't any real point since I don't really want to ride when it is that cold.  Must be my age showing through - there was a time when I'd ride no matter how damn cold it was.  But then again, there was also a time when I'd ride after ten beers to get a couple of cases to tote back to the barracks for those still thirsty.  Some of those adventures should have killed us all except maybe we just didn't know it at the time.

I have decided I need two more days in the week.  One to play poker and/or bridge, the other to bury myself downstairs in my house and fix the mess that is computers.  Procrastination is great stuff, but it can be overdone, and I've been proving that for a couple of years now.  I have a really nice IBM super workstation (dual 3 gigahertz Xeon processors) down there that I bought a year ago to replace the machines now doing mail server, file server, desktop and DVD/CD burning duty - and it still hasn't been fired up.  I'm going to be really pissed off if it won't start up.  I ought to go and get a one of the virtual machine systems except I don't feel like taking the time to learn it just now, so it will end up an XP machine doing everything that is currently done by three machines over in the work side of the basement.  I have a couple of terabyte drives for it that I intended to store all my MP3 and video stuff on - until the 250 and 300 gig drives in Alfred (that's the server's name - all my machines get names....  There's Alfred, Wallis, Rabbit, Howard, Charles, Golem and Andrew out there) started going bad.  Now I have most of a terabyte on failing/failed drives, and am pissed at myself for not taking hold of them when the failure started.  I'll probably have to go out and find all the stuff I had again.  This time, though, I think I'll do a RAID array and lay in a couple of extra terabyte drives against the day one decides to croak. They're cheap enough right now - if you look around they can be had for $100 or so.  If I can find the right motherboard, I may have to twin the super desktop just to keep from stepping on myself.  When Jamie left, he had cleared off what he wanted gone from the downstairs machine, so I can remove it and maybe replace it with something bigger and faster.

There's always something that needs done - I just hope I can recover enough of the web site and FTP site to make their rebuild just a matter of recollecting data from the binary newsgroups.  I'll also have to get a new Newsbin, since mine is on one of the fail3ed drives, and I'll have to go and make nice with Giganews, since my contract with them ran out when I let the credit card die that was used so they cut me off - but that was a year or more back, so they've probably forgot all about it by now.  Maybe I'll start on this tonight if I can find a piece of cat5 to reach from the switch to the table out in the other room.  Sounds like a good project for this evening provided I don't get sucked into a CSI:Miami marathon or something like that.

And of course I still have Christmas shopping to do - just about all of it, and I gotta call my brother because I don't have a clue in hell about what I should surprise him with this year.  This was a whole lot easier when he was only 30 and didn't already own everything that I could afford to get him.  I know - I'll call his wife and see if she has any ideas - although they've been married long enough she's probably as out of ideas as I am.

I think I've had enough fun for today, so I'm going to close up and go home.  Maybe I'll hear from Jamie tonight with more adventures from Australasia.  He's putting up his pictures at http://picasaweb.google.com/ijam357 if anyone wants to look.

Happy Tuesday, y'all.