Equinox weekend wrap-up

The flower_cat wanted to go for a drive this afternoon, so I took my walk at about 10am around the Rose Garden. Always a nice walk; the only thing I don't like is that it's dead flat.

We left for our drive at about 12:45; our usual "all-afternoon drive" goes up Leigh Avenue to Blossom Hill, jogs over to CA Highway 9 in Los Gatos, North on Highway 1 along the coast. We often take 92 in Half Moon Bay and cut over to I-280; this time we went further up 1 past Pacifica to where it joins Skyline Blvd, and went South to 280 from there. In all, about 150 miles and four hours.

Dinner involves corn from the produce stand we always stop at, a few miles South of Half Moon Bay. The Cat is now making scalloped potatoes, using the potatoes from our Organic Express shipment, left-over cheese sauce from the fridge, and left-over ham from the freezer.

15 minutes?

All it takes to stay ahead of clutter is 15 minutes/day. According to my handy LJ tag search, the last time I spent that time was April 13th. I have just spent roughly the last two hours decluttering the office, and the results are barely noticable.

(Of course, that's partly because one of the two boxes I took up to the attic came out of the filing cabinet -- all of the tax returns and raw data for the 1990's. That was so I would have room for the 2006 file, so that I'd have someplace to put the rapidly-accumulating 2007 data. But I haven't started filing that, yet.)

In order to finish off the box of 2006 everything-but-the-taxes, I had to add the banking and investment statements. Which were in a pile under the 2007 statements. Which were being overtowered by the pile of charity requests for the last four months or so. Which are now in a box that is sitting where the 2006 box used to be. Which is on top of the previous batch of charity requests. (We save up most charity requests and sort through them in December when we're feeling generous and have a better idea of how much money we're ending up with. We may have to distribute the load better, or at least do more triage on the fly.)

The result is that several piles are shorter, and there's more room in the filing cabinet, but the total number of boxes of largely-unsorted stuff has remained roughly constant. Discouraging.

Elsewhen today, I spent a couple of hours uncluttering the file server. Next post upwhen, to make it more easily skipped by those not interested in the details of which directory ends up where.

I'm estimating that we'll be in this house for roughly another decade (after which we will most likely be forced to sell it to pay for our retirement). It will probably take us approximately that long to clean out the garage attic.

15 minutes in cyberspace

The purpose of today's computer clutter control is to get a start on my near-term goal of bringing some order and sanity to the crawling chaos that is the household file server. The non-geekish may want to skip this one.

The main motivations for this are the recent disk crash on the workstation, trantor (no lasting harm done, but there's nothing like a near miss to make you more cautious), and the fact that I've acquired a significant amount of offsite storage to use for backups.

In order to do offsite backups, I have to make a clear distinction between private stuff that has to be encrypted offsite, and the public and semi-public stuff most of which is on the web already and can simply be mirrored. Then there's the pile of stuff that's mirrored from elsewhere, including the Debian mirror, the collection of ripped CDs, and so on.

Right now these are all jumbled together, which leaves a few anomalies like saving monthly snapshots of things that will never change.

( So here's the plan... )

The main accomplishment for yesterday was writing the scripts to back up the configuration files in /etc on all the servers, and putting them in /home/Config.

The main accomplishment for today was setting up /vv/users and figuring out what goes there, and figuring out how to split up the current /vv/local/starport. Not much else, but at least now I know where things belong.

Not to brag, or anything, but...

gc:~# uptime
 21:48:51 up 500 days,  2:28,  2 users,  load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00

Probably ought to do the gateway upgrades sometime this week.