The Adventures of Recalcitrant Toy

I must totally sound like an angst driven rotary engine. This year has not been kind by way of nature beating the shit out of people I care about, especially my best friend and my dad. Dad goes under the knife at 11 today for at least a quad bypass. So why am I still here? Cuz I have a medical stuff phobia that would necessitate likely meeting the floor up close and personal if I see him after surgery with the vent in, tubes everywhere, IVs, etc. etc. Family says to stay away until at least Thursday, when I'll likely fly up to NH until Friday night.

Meantime, I don't have to worry about finding something to do this summer. I have many, many rehearsals to go to as a bit player in Coriolanus . This promises to be a lot of fun (as well as a lot of work) complete with an impressive cast of significantly cool and geeky people with lots of vision, ability and, most of all, passion. It will be a great show if we don't all get shot by angry right wing hoards.

What! Me worry?

Yesterday I found my T1 was down, so I went down to the pit of an machine "room" (a closet) to try to figure it out. Recycled the router and the switches....nothing. Then I noticed that the server was not functioning. I tried restarting it, but nothing. Absolutely nothing. A machine next to it was working, so I figured that it might be a power issue and swapped the cables between the machines. A loud bang and some smoke later, the previously functioning machine was now dead at my hands. Seems that one of the cables was feeding 220 and one was feeding 110. Well gee, that would have been nice to know beforehand. So now my server that I had been fighting with a few weeks ago with a hard drive failure is now down with what I think is a dead power supply. The Apple Store said they couldn't help because it was over 5 years old and they have no parts. Great. So I found parts online and will hopefully get a new power supply today.

T1, unfortunately, is still down. Hopefully Verizon will get off their proverbial buttocks and fix it. I have a suspicion that the issue with this is also power. Dominion Virginia Power has been running all over the area trying to fix things, and I bet they threw a surge at us.

Meantime, enough is enough with this server. I'm replacing it with X Serves. X Serves have parts available. That is a good thing.

So, my only mail is available on mac.com. Again. My websites are down. Again. On the positive side, I've had my first explosion :-). Boom and everything. W00t! Perhaps I'll go back to sleep. Maybe by the time I wake up, this dial up will have loaded my friends page :-).

Waiting for word on the surgery. I would have liked to have been up there, but an inability to properly breathe along with sinus headaches do not bode well for cabin pressures above 5000 feet. Although that part is getting better, the thought of spending over an hour in agony to get to a hospital where my constant coughing, sneezing and dripping would not make anyone happy, plus Mom's nonchalant attitude towards the whole thing including "you sound terrible, stay in bed" convinced me to stay.

I should be receiving a phone call from Dad any minute now. It's already a bit longer than I'm really comfortable with. They scheduled 2 1/2 hours for this, and it was supposed to start at 7:45, which means we should have heard by 10:15. However, these things do tend to run late, so I'm not freaking out yet.

On a happier note, all my mail was recovered, breathing is a bit easier, and I had weird dreams about leading an insurrection on an army base. Boggle.

Please please if someone has a magic cure for zits let me know. Stridex benzoil peroxide wipes are not working. Witch hazel is not working. I most certainly am too old for this nonsense.