So, today I made ravioli.
In fact, I made roast butternut squash ravioli. Hand made the ravioli, prepared the squash filling (Slice in half, clear out gunk, roast in a pool of water at 190oc for 40 minutes, mix with butter, nutmeg & a dash of cinnamon and fill ravioli, then boil parcels for 5-7 minutes, serve with pepper), and had a minor epiphany.
Yesterday, I faced the possibility that the entirety of Aquarionics – that is, five years of archives, all the code and comments too – had just gone the way that my entire MP3 collection did last month (as well as the backups of Aquarionics). That is, was gone forever.
The robot that graces this week’s header was given to me as a present by the sysadmin of the box that Aquarionics (And istic, and afphrid, and everything) runs on and his wife. (That is, he is the sysadmin of the box, not the sysadmin of his wife. Probably. Though possibly of his wife’s computer. If you’re reading this sentence, I failed to go back and edit this paragraph for comprehension. Sorry). The robot is wonderful, and contains a clock.
The site has been down, as you may have noticed, for a little while. This has included all the .istic.net sites as well as others not run by me. This was because as far as I can tell, the server that runs it threw a tantrum and spat the home directories out of its high chair. It wasn’t until the words “Drive failure” were mentioned that I realised that my various off-site backup machines had all suffered catastrophic hard-drive failures in the last six months (‘tis the season). I had no backups of the code at all, and none of the archives since July.
The ravioli was nice. It was tasty, it went well. Only one of the parcels split in the saucepan, and I was pleased. Partly, I was pleased because over the past few months I haven’t had much of an opportunity to create a full thing from ultimate raw ingredients, and there was a sense of achievement in doing something I hadn’t ever done before (Make fresh pasta of any kind, use butternut squash) and it all working.
I’ve been talking to people about why they read the site, what they read it for. It’s a mystery to me, really.
Sysadmin Pol saved the day, of course, and all the sites that were running are running, as well as a new set of rsync’d offsite backups to three locations around the globe. I am not paranoid at all.
I was given the Robot by Pol & Mouse for being part of their wedding, though the honour of being involved would have been enough. The robot sits on my desk (It sat on my monitor at BrowserAngel, It’ll sit on my monitor at Evolving when I get around to taking it in, which will probably be when my three-month ‘trial period’ ends and I can relax a bit). It looks a little like a more cheerful version of the old style Marvin, except with an added clock. It’s a reminder of a Good Thing, too.
I realised that I won’t have time. I don’t have time to do Aquarionics as it is, nor to cook, nor to work on any other project. Changing AqCom into a weekly multi-media-mega-post thing won’t mean I have to do any less work (Even if Epistula makes the technical side childsplay), and the weekly restriction will stop me just being able to post when I want to.
The only solution, really, is to make more time. More effective use of the time I do have (Get my laptop working – or replace it – and use it to compose things on the bus. Post entries during my lunch break).
So the grand masterplan to completely rework how I do this has been shelved for a while. I’m back, here, and I have a nice list of things I need to write about.