So it’s been six days since my last blog entry — my apologies for the masses of loyal readers. 🙂

This past week has been quite the bit of busy-ness, so by the time I’ve managed to sit down to do pictures (which also took a break here and there, although not for nearly as long), it was time to go to bed.

Friday night we ended up at Erik & Jill’s house. This was after I was at the office, then spent some time in the tractor, and then met Erik for happy hour at the Eagles’ club. We didn’t get home until around 11PM, so I was awfully tired by the time we got Kirstin to bed and I did the daily pictures.

Saturday I intended to sleep in and get a few things done outside. While I did sleep in, I ended up out in the tractor for the majority of the day. It was a good time, but it didn’t get the lawn mowed. 🙂

Sunday was normal in the morning, and we later ended up out at the Nelson Pumpkin Farm for a time. It was a good time (see the link for the pictures), but on the way back Jill hit her head, ended up in the hospital, and we took Henry for the night.

That’s definitely the condensed version of that story, but it made for a busy evening. It worked out well, though, and Erik came out Monday afternoon to get Henry; Jill got out of the hospital, and life goes on. 🙂

And so far this week I’ve been keeping pretty busy with work in various forms. So that’s a good thing.

Except…

Yesterday afternoon (Tuesday), I discovered that a hard drive failed in the server box. As the server basically houses the oldest equipment in the house, it was no real surprise to me. So I’ve had to shut that down for the time being, and all local traffic is on the same subnet as the modem itself (and not in the DMZ behind the server as it was before the shutdown). That at least keeps the network accessible to the Internet. Since the modem is a NAT device (and firewalled at the NOC) and each of the Windows boxen on the local network are firewalled, there should be no reasonable security problem due to the missing server.

It’s basically just going to make it impossible to scan pictures for the time being. This shouldn’t be an issue, though, since it’s not very often I scan things.

This morning I encountered a more troublesome problem, though. My computer froze up and upon reboot was not able to recognize the 80GB hard drive (I refer to it as the “data” drive since it primarily contains just data and not system or program information). It wasn’t being recognized by the CMOS/BIOS, which is a Bad Thing.

In haste, since I didn’t have any time to mess with it at home, I removed the drive, grabbed a spool of DVD-R’s, and brought the drive to the office with me. To my surprise, when plugged into my main workstation at the office, the drive was immediately recognized. Since I’ve got about 100GB of free disk space at the office, I made a ‘backup’ copy of the entire contents of the possibly failing drive. Just in case. Since I didn’t encounter any problems in the transfer, I didn’t burn any DVD’s.

Upon return home, I re-installed the drive and it was immediately recognized by the machine. Strange. Things seem to be working without issue once again, and that’s a Good Thing. I also have an off-site backup of the ‘data’ drive (another Good Thing).

While I had the box open and was working on drives, I decided to ‘upgrade’ my system/program drive (which was a very loud 28.5GB drive) to a new, unused 40GB drive (I got it on sale about a year ago and hadn’t used it anywhere). So I broke out PartitionMagic (an excellent application, I might add), copied partitions over to the new drive — literally disk images, and removed the old 28.5GB drive. My machine is now whisper quiet and seems to perform a little better than it used to.

So I now have a loud, but functioning 28.5GB drive that I will likely use in the server restoration project at some point in time. That said, though, the server may very well end up in the basement on a shelf where it can be as loud as it needs to be without disturbing the rest of the house. We’ll see about that and when/if that happens, because I need to have the structured media center in place before I can even think about actually moving the stuff there.

So anyway, that pretty much brings us to now. And seeing as how it’s now 11PM, I’m heading for bed. And hoping it won’t be another few days before I post again. I’m sure it won’t since it’s pretty rainy right now (so I’ll not be in the tractor as much for the next few days), but you never know…

So until next time…

“I do not consider it an insult, but rather a compliment to be called an agnostic. I do not pretend to know where many ignorant men are sure — that is all that agnosticism means.”
– Clarence Darrow, Scopes trial, 1925.

–MZ