I cracked out my IBM PC/AT-turned-K5/100 today and fired it up for the first time since I bought my house. I wanted to download some ISOs and play with some things like DietLinux and Knoppix, but my aged AT is the only system I have with a usable CD burner. The hard drive in my box that contains my good CD burner died back in February or so, and I had other priorities (ahem), so I never replaced the drive. Now I've got different other priorities (which I won't talk about just yet), but even if I had another drive, I can't seem to find my Nero CD. So it just makes more sense to pull the AT off the bench.

"Honda!" a teenager yelled out the window as I sat at a stoplight at the intersection of Lindbergh and Lemay Ferry roads. I was in a lineup of tricked-out cars. Mine was the least tricked out.

I want to write a book. A short book. One that won't mention computers at all, hopefully. I'm thinking 100-120 pages would be a good length. A Christian book. Not terribly deep, but very hands-on and practical, which will say what God has to say about a problem a growing number of people face. (What I have to say alone isn't especially worthwhile. I'm just a journalist turned systems administrator, which means I studied a lot about nothing in particular in college, and somewhere along the way learned about computers.)

The most appropriate word I can think of to describe most of my relationships is "rocky," but if there's one thing I can say about my last effort, it's that I've finally learned something useful about love. I post it in the hopes that it will help somebody else.

Someone I know house-sat this weekend for a couple who are slightly older than my parents. Their youngest daughter, from what I could tell, is about my age, and they have two older daughters. All are out of the house.

I don't have anything interesting to tell you today, but since Steve DeLassus sends me at least a weekly dose from people who think their laundry is interesting, I'll tell you about my day yesterday.

I'm sending out an S.O.S. to the world.
--The Police

It's silver. It's a year old. It's fully loaded. It rolled 10,000 miles while I was test-driving it. It's an EX, not the miserly HX. I like miserly. But it'll hold value better than an HX, and it cost me about $500 less. The difference between 40 MPG on the highway and 38 MPG on the highway just wasn't worth it to me.

Yesterday we managed to back up our 40 or so NT servers without incident for the first time in years. OK, months. It seemed like years. It wasn't that long ago that I nearly woke up my neighbors after receiving my fourth 2-am backup failure phone call that week. As I walked through the hallway to fire up the laptop and log in, I pounded the wall in frustration and screamed, "Just once, let me sleep through the night without bothering me. Just once!"

I did not feel good this morning, and it didn't get much better during the day. By lunch, it felt like someone had crammed a tennis ball down my throat and it didn't seem to matter how many cough drops I sucked down.