Done last week/month (20160828Su - 0903Sa)

[mdlbear]

If yesterday is going to be typical of this vacation (I'm taking all of the coming week off), I'm going to need a month or two of work to recover from it. Not fun.

Friday Nova, my main server, developed a corrupted root partition. I've been keeping an eye on that drive for a while, and had a replacement on hand, so I set up a transfer of the home and data partitions and went to bed. So far, so good.

Yesterday was another matter entirely. Installing a new copy of Debian should only have taken an hour or so. Hah! Instead, I was plagued by a long series of problems, which took me pretty much the entire day to finally analyze. These included:

1. A corrupted download of the Debian installer. It appeared to work ok, but the keys on the right-hand side of the keyboard kept generating the wrong characters! WTF?
2. Apparently the idiot Intel motherboard I used for my server won't let you change the boot order of your hard disks (despite having a BIOS option that claims to do exactly that), and it considers a USB key to be a hard disk. So if you have a hard drive that doesn't already have a bootable OS on it, it will keep the damned thing from booting.
3. Snowflake, the box I've been using for a desktop apparently has a similar problem.

I eventually ended up using the only other working spare system, Trantor, to install Ubuntu. I then swapped the disk into the former Snowflake, which is significantly faster and quieter than either Trantor or the Atom board I'd been using for Nova, so that's a win. I also decided, since I now had Ubuntu on Nova, and it was the fastest machine I had, that I would use it as my desktop as well as my fileserver. There are some potential problems with that, but I have to admit that it's convenient.

It will probably take me a while to get everything on (Novo) Nova configured -- I still need to start doing backups, for example, and don't have a web server up yet -- but at least I have DNS and my main file store up and running. But there was a lot of frustration involved.

The frustration made me more susceptible to other sources of stress, so sure enough, that happened too. Kat and Rabbit are in the process of moving out into their own apartment (finally!), so they brought movers in to handle the bed, the futon, and some other large furniture. Which meant taking the seats off the stairlifts.

And, of course, Colleen woke up and walked down the first flight of stairs before calling for help. I hastily put the seat back on the lower lift, and told Colleen (not exactly calmly -- I was pretty stressed at that point) that she should have gone back to the room, sat down, and called for help.

Then the lower lift wouldn't go back up to its charging position. It was already pretty badly damaged from previous moving attempts; it turned out that the limit switch that detects whether the seat is turned properly had finally broken to the point of unusability. Its little cam follower had been crumpled up from previous clumsy seat replacements. There ensued a frantic search for my multimeter (and a hasty battery replacement) so that I could identify the normally-closed contacts on the switch and move the connectors to them.

At that point I went back to my struggles with the computers. Just as I was getting things pretty stable there, Colleen went up to bed. Or tried to: the bottom lift didn't want to go up. Again. More swearing. More switches to reconnect. A quick trip to Google to look up error code E6, which turned out to be the bottom limit switch. Which hadn't given us any trouble up to that point.

... by that time I was a complete wreck. My stress level was not helped by being worried sick -- literally, by that point -- about the fact that the check from my stock sale still hasn't showed up. And berating myself about not being persistent enough to figure out from Morgan Stanley's miserable website how to do a direct transfer.

The one good thing about all this is that I tend to wake up around 4:30 when I'm stressed. When I feel as though I don't have enough time to get everything done, it helps.

It's been a long month. September is fired. Notes & links:

0828Su
  * Up 6:20; W=205.4, P=113/81, p=66; dishes
  @ Post From Tumblr The Curb Cut
    Effect, or Why It Is Basically Impossible To Appropriate From Disabled - kyburg
    @ Color Communication Badges | Autistic Self Advocacy Network [pdf]
  * cleaned up tags in MakeStuff.  The tags were left over from testing "make deploy".
    git tag -d `git tag -l "deployed/*" | head -14`; git push --tags github
  : github puts the tags under the "Releases" tab.
  ^ The obvious name for my portable config is probably Honu. There are only a handful of
    others on github, including a game and a data-collection pipeline, but not nearly as
    many as turtle.  There's only one c-turtle, so that's possible but ugly, and only one
    hawksbill and 5 leatherback.  Loggerhead and Ridley are all over the place.  I still
    like honu.  So it's either Honu or some variant of Honu-Config, none of which I like.
  @ Green sea turtle (honu) - Matilda is definitely a honu:  they're the only species
    of sea turtle with a range that exactly matches her family's itinerary.  
  * out shopping: Walgreens, Petco, QFC.
  : 4:45 Ticia being adorable with the glitter ball.
  @ wttr.in/Seattle Works from a terminal with curl
    GitHub - chubin/wttr.in: Web frontend for wego
  ^ figured out the right move for Honu -- move the current Config to local and trim it,
    and make Honu either a clean start or a massively-git-filter-branched/BFG'd copy.

0829Mo
  * up 6:00; W=203.6, P=136/80, p=54; dishes
  * Not a terribly productive day at work -- too many meetings and a few major
    distractions.  But at least not a disaster, and $BOSS rescheduled our 1-1 from
    Tuesday, so I didn't have to reschedule my afternoon appointment.  So... ok.
  * Took N out to dinner before her all-hands meeting at work.  The Flying Fish, at the
    corner of Westlake and Thomas.  They have a happy hour with $1 oysters.  Definitely
    taking Colleen there next week.
  % 9:20 P=138/75, p=68
  @ Quora: answer to Why can't you write a program which determines if another program is
    stuck? Just too much fun not to post.  Q(p, i) -> {while H(p, i) {}; false}

0830Tu
  * Up 5:50ish; W=202.4, P=124/83, p=66; laundry
  @ Questionable Content 3297 Keep in Touch Clinton and Brun exchanging phone numbers
    and immediately exchanging texts: "Can I text you instead? I don't like talking on the
    phone." "Yeah, that'd be better, phone calls make me anxious."  SO MUCH THIS.
  @ Gene Wilder - died yesterday :(
  * 3:30 Anita Brown.  quora, a.c, github.
    % depression score 3, which is the lowest ever.  anxiety 6, which is typical.
    -> Daily goals for vacation week
  . next step for MakeStuff - move in directories that use it.
    * /vv/users/steve, mirror/vv/..., savitzky.net:git/..., savitzky.net:vv/...
      		     add MakeStuff and Honu to .gitignore.
    * /vv/users/steve/* All subdirs of steve:
      for f in Albums Boilerplate Concerts Fliers bin;do (cd $f;ln -sf ../Makefile .) done
    * /vv/web.  web/* all have links for Tools -> ../Tools, Makefile -> Tools/Makefile

0831We
  * up 6:15; W=203.0, P=122/80, p=65; laundry, dishes
  & something vaguely resembling burgers.  The ground beef was partly cooked when thawed,
    so some of them are very vague.
    % between CD, fan noise, and multiple conversations I have retreated to my cave.
  @ What Facebook Data Center Team Learned from Shutting Down Entire Facilities 
  @ So, You Must Talk to the Woman Who Is Wearing Headphones - The Washington Post
    Poem.  Funny as heck.

0901Th
  * up 6:15; W=203, P=118/75, p=59; dishes, laundry
  * shop first thing in the morning for chicken, mushrooms, wine; we do have scallions.
  ~ 8:30 builder meeting
  @ Perpetual Motion Machines — Real Life f(Andrew Eigel) self-driving vehicles
  @ Ursula Le Guin Has Earned a Rare Honor. Just Don’t Call Her a Sci-Fi Writer. - NYT 
    the Library of America
  % P=110/80, p=70

0902Fr
  * Up 4:40; P=117/79, p=65; laundry, dishes
  * Reasonably productive.  CR out.
  : Nova's root partition crashed.  Grump.
    Should have switched to the new drive a long time ago.  Oh, well.  I'm doing it now.
    Fortunately, thanks to git, I'm able to work pretty much as if nothing had happened.
  % 9:37pm P=120/90, p=61

0903Sa
  * up 5:15ish; W=205.4, P=119/78, p=65; laundry, Shower, dishes
  * Disk swapped on Nova.  Now I just have to do the install.  Of course, it would help if
    I had a disk to install from.
    -> Nova seems to be borked in some very fundamental way.  Corrupted BIOS?  keys on
       the right-hand side of the keyboard are sending wrong characters.  Doesn't matter
       which keyboard.  I may just hijack Trantor or Algol.  Or Snowflake. 
  : Kat and Alex had movers in for their furniture.
  & Meanwhile, the seat position limit switch on one of C's chairlifts finally gave up the
    ghost.  Switched the connectors to the NC terminals.  Much swearing.  Hope I didn't
    freak out C' (the tenant).  Not * how * I * wanted to * start my * vacation.  (Replace
    *'s with the obvious four letters.  Actual self-quote.)  Beats having to sleep
    downstairs until sometime next week.
  : Trantor has a flaky BIOS, and Dorsai's been cannibalized for its CPU.  So... Algol,
    Snowflake, one of the 32-bit boards, a laptop, or go out and buy a board.
    Hmm.  Algol as desktop, and Snowflake -> nova.
  & Total frustration getting nova's disk up on snowflake's hardware.  The problem seems
    to be a corrupted installer; finally managed with Ubuntu.  Which means it'll probably
    be something of a nightmare getting it configured.  tasksel might help.
  % Worried sick -- literally -- about the check.  I am an idiot.
  % If today is going to be typical of my vacation, I may need a couple of weeks at work
    to recover.
  * DNS running on nova.  DHCP reconfigured to point to it instead of snowflake.
    That was the main thing I was worried about.  That and of course the mirror, which
    can wait a day or two, apache, and /home which would be trivial except for configs.
    There's still a lot of browser config on snowflake; that will take a bit of work.
  * Snowflake works fine in what used to be Trantor.  So that's a potential win.  Might
    work even better in Algol.  Although chrome happily copied all my open tabs from
    Trantor, so there may not be much I want from that machine.
  % 8:12 pm P=139/88, p=79
  : Working on nova, and having it run the same OS and version as my other machines, will
    definitely simplify my workflow.  Even if it does feel rather odd.
  : Near as I can tell, the motherboard that was Nova is really most sincerely dead.
    Actually, it had a RAM stick that wasn't seated, but even then it has an interesting
    problem:  you can't change the boot order of the hard drives, so if you have an
    unbootable drive and a USB stick, it will try to boot from the drive.  :P  It can boot
    from PXE, though.  Hmm.  Additional DHCPd Options text box
    	 boot_file pxelinux.0
	 siaddr 
	 option tftp 
    via PXE Server through DD-WRT router setup DHCPd and DNSMasq 
  : Yet another, different stairlift problem.  Bottom limit switch.
  % Today is totally fired.  So is September.

Comments

[alatefeline]

*offers hugs*

I'm so sorry that you have so much stress going on right now. I agree; fire September and get another month in pronto.

[mdlbear]

*hugs*
Thanks.

[alatefeline]

*HUGS.*

[elf]

Posts like this do not fill me with encouragement to start using Linux, much less make a full switch.

Also: This Vote Is Legally Binding, poem in response to the "Talking to Women Wearing Headphones" articles.

[amaebi.livejournal.com]

That is a totally hideous start to the month. I am so very sorry. :(

[mdlbear]

Thanks! I'm doing a little better today, but I'm still running pretty close to the edge.

[amaebi.livejournal.com]

*useless handpat offered*

[mdlbear]

Actually, handpats are far from useless. Thanks again.