Aquarionics

One day, many years from now, I shall be able to look back on today and say “Oh, that was the day with the eCommerce System”, and I will be able to laugh.

Today is not that day.

And the best part? I’d love to explain to you exactly what happened, but I’d be sued.

And fired.

And problably shot.

From a cannon.

On top of this, the bus from Bedford was early, so I missed it. The bus from Hitchin was early, so I missed that too. And the taxi driver overcharged me.

Tomorrow: Driving Lessons Redux.

Now: Pizza.

One

So, two dwarves were discussing who would win in a fight between an elf and a bucket of coal dust.

The result was a bit messy, so they called it a drow.

Two

Between our house and the A1 are a couple of rows of monkey puzzle trees.

This is baffling.

So, the week then.

Tuesday I got home from work at about 20:00 as usual. I discovered that atoll, my main server and home to my life, documents, music and email was thrashing at a 50.00 load average and the terminal was spewing out line upon line of “DriveSeek Failed” errors. This was not an unknown error, Atoll’s previous hard drive (Identical make and model) died in a similer way about a year and a half ago. The drive can read fine, but as soon as you try to write to it it thrashes the computer completely. I ended up buying the replacement drive (the one that has just died) and eventually (about two months ago) sent the old one off to be repaired. So I sat and swore at the drive for a while, redirected my email, powered off the computer, and wished I had more time to deal with this.

At this point, there was a doorbell. Nobody apart from the Jehovahs Witnesses and the Pizza People use our doorbell, so at 9pm this was unexpected.

It was, in fact, our neighbour. He was delivering a package that UPS had failed to.

It was the replacement hard drive.

The timing of this was so incredibly fortuitous that my immediate reaction was to install the drive and start copying the data. This was hastily kyboshed. The last thing I want to do is replace the dead drive with the same model that has died so faithfully twice before.

Wednesday I got atoll to stay together long enough to be able to edit /etc/fstab so that the broken partition (it was only one partition this time) was mounted read only, which means the server is back together until next month, when I can buy a new hard drive. Eventually, I decide to put the replacement 120 gig drive into my desktop, where it doesn’t matter so much if it dies. I resolve to do this at the weekend.

Thursday

Can you guess what happens Thursday?

1. Everything works perfectly.
2. The main server dies
3. The main server explodes

1. The hard drive in my desktop dies.

   Anyone who went for the forth option can have a cookie.

   This has been a bad hardware week.

atoll.water.gkhs.net, my main server, filestore and sane point of the universe, has just informed me that it can’t read from /dev/hda – the one and only hard-drive – due to a hardware fault.

Until fridayish – when I can replace the drive – assume my email is as dead as a very dead thing.

Do not, under any circumstances, buy 100gig drives from IBM/Hitachi.

If you need to contact me use the email address nicholas dot avenell at gmail dot com, where all else is being forwarded.

For the last year, I’ve commuted from Reading (and later Letchworth) to KX London by train. All was good. Well, I was spending as much on train fares as I was on rental, but mostly good.

Recently, I started commuting from Letchworth (which is on the Cambridge spur of the railway out from london) to Bedford (which is on the Bedford spur from same). Going by train was going to take four hours each way. So I go by bus.

It takes half an hour by car to go from my office to home. I know this because someone gave me a lift once, every other day I’ve spent two hours each way commuting, plus the half hour early I get to work, and the half hour late I have to leave because the buses don’t mesh with my work hours. That’s four hours excess that I spend every single day because I’m taking the bus, added to the fuckwittery that means that buses not only leave late, but frequently come (and leave) early, have totally different numbers on one sign to the other (and, of course, are going by neither route) , and yet I’m still bothered by militantly anti-car people who berate me for having the desire to destroy the countryside, kill thousands a year personally as I ride rough-shod over the battered and broken bodies of those who are killed in traffic accidents, and – incidentally – have more than two hours in my week day to actually sit down and watch TV.

But I can’t tell them that, of course, because I don’t have time. I have a bus to catch at 06:30 tomorrow morning.