As a journalist, I was taught not to sugarcoat, so I won't sugarcoat here either. My good friend Debby, who has been fighting cancer for nearly two years, died on Monday.
I'd been hosting a semi-regular blog for Debby. It's been some time since she's been able to type, so two of her longtime friends--including my high school computer science teacher--have been posting updates for her.
The last few days I've been having a really hard time concentrating due to headaches and stuff like that. So although I've had time to sit down and write, I haven't really been able to actually sit down and do it.
I'm going to see the doctor on Monday. I'm really hoping that my osteopath will act like an osteopath and do OMT on my neck this time, rather than giving me more harsh drugs.
But I gots a dead server. No, this server's fine, but one of the servers at work is dying a horrible death. So I'll be dealing with that this weekend, instead of writing cool stuff. Part of me wants to complain, but then another part of me reminds me that it's because of emergencies like this that I have a nice house and a nice car and I'm ahead of schedule on paying off both of them, so that part of me shuts up pretty fast.
So anyway, I may not resurface for a few days, depending on how this goes.
It was 1993. Bill Clinton had been president for a few short months. The Coral Courts Motel and the 66 Park-In Theater still stood along what used to be Route 66. Popular bands included 10,000 Maniacs and Gin Blossoms. The movie Sliver was a disappointment. The TV show Cheers said goodbye, and Beavis and Butt-Head said hello. General Motors sued NBC for rigging crash explosions on Dateline. Other names in the news included David Koresh, Janet Reno, Rodney King, and Michael Jordan.
I've been keeping a low profile lately. That's for a lot of reasons. I've been doing mostly routine sysadmin work lately, which is mind-numbingly boring to write about, and possibly just a little bit less mind-numbingly boring to read about. While a numb mind might not necessarily be a bad thing, there are other reasons not to write about it.
I might finally have reliable DSL. Gatermann and I spent a good part of the day cleaning up my phone wiring. The wiring appeared to have been done by someone who couldn't make up his mind how he wanted to do it. Seeing as I had two jacks that didn't work anyway, and I own exactly three telephones plus an answering machine, we pulled out a number of the runs altogether (the wires are still there, just not hooked up at the box). And we cleaned up some oxidation that had shown up on some of the lines that were there.
I had to take some time away to clear my head and find myself. It's a survival tactic; the guy other people wanted Dave to be hasn't been getting the job done.
I was hoping that by now I would be upgraded to WordPress, the successor to the b2 blogging program that I use, and that I would have a running DietLinux box on some system, and that I'd be coming back to you with some cool tricks you can do with a Knoppix CD.
