Personal

That wasn’t the Sunday I had planned

Dave Farquhar Personal , , ,

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.
I’m 0 for 3.

WordPress is up and running inside my firewall, and there are some nice things about it, but if I move, I lose some stuff. Such as? Most of the code I had Steve write for me won’t run under WordPress. No recent comments, no scoring whatsoever, and searching gives you the posts, rather than links to the posts, which could be deadly if you searched for the word “the.”

Seeing the entries right away when you do a search or hit a category link is fine on blogs that don’t have a lot of entries, but when I have 1,200+ of them, that’s bad. It’s better to return titles with links to the entries.

What do I gain? The ability to make entries and not publish them just yet. The ability to close entries to comments. Movable Type-compatible pingbacks and trackbacks. In a future version, multiple categories per post. That’s all worth a lot.

So I’ll move. Not just this weekend, sadly.

A big chunk of the day went to fixing Gatermann’s web server. The nice thing about Linux is you never have to reboot it. (If you run Debian, you can even upgrade across versions without having to reboot.) The bad thing about Linux is that since you never have to reboot it, if you power it down, you really don’t have much way of knowing if the system’s going to come back up. After jumping through way too many hoops, we got the thing booted with a rescue disk, and when I looked at it, I couldn’t figure out how the system ever booted the first time. For one thing, I couldn’t find a kernel. Obviously at some point in this system’s life, something went horribly, horribly wrong.

Nothing we could think of would repair it, so we ended up archiving all the important stuff like /etc, then wiped and reinstalled. I’m sure if we’d persisted, we could have brought it back to life, but from the time he got here to the time I started reinstalling, three CDs had played on my stereo. I can install Debian in 15 minutes on a fast system, and 35 minutes on a slowpoke.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not mad or upset or anything. I’m a little disappointed that I wasn’t able to fix it in 10 minutes though. But then I remember that two of those CDs that played during that timeframe were by The Cure. If two hours straight of The Cure doesn’t make you feel a a little down on yourself, nothing will.

But I’ll have to give Bob and his revolving door of bandmates credit for making me think about it. There was a time when I would have given almost anything to be the biggest Unix guru in St. Louis. That’s over. These days system wizardry is a means to an end. It pays me enough money to give me a house in a middle-class neighborhood, and a car that’s practical yet draws looks, and leaves enough left over to do nice things for people. Although the job can be demanding, I have more free time than Dad ever had. I mean, I found out this morning that three of my friends have started a band and I got to hear a very early mix of their CD. I can get excited, because I’ve got enough time to at the very least go see them. And if they need someone to write some propaganda for them, I can do that.

After dinner, I re-tackled the WordPress project, but that part of my brain’s just fried. I had to laugh at a question Steve asked me in e-mail. He asked why weekends take more out of him than the workweek. I know the answer to that one. Since we’re low-tier aristocrats, we’ve always got stuff that needs to be done. And the stuff around the house can very easily be more draining than the stuff we do for 40 hours a week. And when the workweek gets to be too much, you just call up a friend and take a long lunch–make up the time at the end of the day after everyone else has left and the office is quiet–and talk about home ownership and other low-tier aristocratic things to get your mind off work.

So as much as I’d love to go find some vexing question and solve it and then turn it over to Google to direct people with the question to my answer, I just don’t have it in me. Not today. And thinking about work to try to escape the drains of low-tier aristocracy seems, well, sick.

A Peter Gabriel CD and a book would be really good right about now.

I’m taking everyone’s advice and doing what I love

Dave Farquhar Personal , ,

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.
I must have pillaged it for parts at one point because the SCSI host adapter and NIC were both missing. So I replaced them, and fired it up and the HD was gone. I know I saw an HD in there, so I checked the BIOS and found it wasn’t set up right. So I autodetected everything, rebooted, and Linux refused to boot. I popped out the Debian installation CD, selected the “mount a previously initialized partition” option, and saw the partitions on /dev/hdc, rather than /dev/hda where I would expect them. When I was pillaging, I must have pulled the IDE cables and plugged them back in the wrong place when I was finished. I can’t remember those kinds of details anymore. I’d rather spend those neurons remembering details about a girl (like, say, that she likes Tori Amos and Train and Delerious?) than obscure details about a computer I rarely use.

I probably could have fixed it by editing /etc/fstab (actually /target/etc/fstab when you’re booted from the Debian installer) and then re-running LILO, but I’ll always be more confident in my knowledge of hardware than of any operating system, so I reached for a screwdriver and went for the sure thing. Popping the case for the 12th time and rearranging the cables rendered the system bootable again.

The machine’s hostname is burn. Nice. That’s one of my favorite songs by The Cure. I tried a couple of the usual suspects for the root password, and I was in.

Incidentally, I’m doing all of this stuff in pursuit of answers. You’ll be hearing from me again later this weekend.

Why was I cruising Lindbergh on a Friday night?

Dave Farquhar Personal

“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 was in between Christian bookstores. I’d been out in search of whole-wheat pasta, black pillowcases, and two people I know. I found the whole-wheat pasta. I hoped one of the Christian bookstores would have the last thing on my list. Lemstone had all their books marked down by 20% because they were moving. They had about 12 books left, total, in the store. None of them was what I was looking for. So I braved the cruisers and headed off to One Way.

I was searching for Date…or Soul Mate? How To Know If Someone is Worth Pursuing in Two Dates or Less by Neil Clark Warren. I read another one of his books five or six years ago and it helped me then. He has some good advice.

I have a few motivations for reading this particular book, and regular readers can probably guess most of them. Maybe all of them.

I found it, in the Men’s section, of all places. There were more books on singlehood in the Men’s section than there were books about dealing with being male. Including some written by and for women. I may have to revisit some of the others. I’m thinking I’ll post a review of Date or Soul Mate? when I’ve finished reading it.

That’s it, I want to be an author again

Dave Farquhar Personal

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.)
Back to that book. I want it to say to people what my heroes Paul Zindel, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Max Lucado said to me the first time I picked up and read a book written by each of them: Hey, I understand what you’re going through right now. Not only that, I understand you, because I’ve been there too. I know your doubts and your fears, because I’m having them right now. I know it doesn’t seem like enough that God says He’ll pull you through it, because I know He will, and yet it doesn’t seem like enough for me either.

Anyone out there have any experience in the Christian publishing biz, by any chance? (You never know.) The subject matter? Well, one might be able to make an educated guess, but I’d really rather not confirm anything just yet.

What I’ve learned about love

Dave Farquhar Personal

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.
I don’t know that this is the best way to happiness, but it’s the best way I’ve found in my 28 years walking this earth. Find somebody, then dedicate your efforts into making that other person happy.

Happiness, to me, has always been fleeting. I have a pretty somber disposition, so happiness is a rare treat. I found a bunch of it when I went on a mission trip. I found some of it the first time I published a magazine article, and again the first time I published a book. I occasionally find it in friendships. But I’ll be brutally honest here: Even while on the mission trip, at the very height of the trip, I found myself aged 27 and desperately lonely. I’d written a lyric back in 1997 at the end of a breakup. It said: “You ask what’s left, I’ve just got God / One day that will be enough / But in the meantime I still exist.”

When I wrote it, I wasn’t thinking of one day here and there, that being enough. But that was what I got. The lyric was still true, nearly five years after I’d written it.

In October, I found myself in a relationship, and like many of my relationships, it took off like a rocket. Unlike the overwhelming majority of my relationships, this one had some distance to it. But in time, the newness and the perfection faded away, leaving two people who loved each other, but who also seemed to possess a very significant talent for hurting one another.

I’ll be forever in debt to Steve Mahaffey, who pointed me to the Marriage Builders website. Dr. Willard Harley makes a buttload of sense. (I’m sure he’ll be thrilled to see his name in the same sentence with that particular word.)

His idea of the most important emotional needs is very like the advice in Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus, but it gets to the point a whole lot faster and tells you more. It also doesn’t just talk in generalities, which is important. Yes, I’m a man, but I do have at least one trait that’s more commonly associated with women (in my case, it’s because I’m a grown child of an alcoholic).

Here’s my paraphrase of Harley’s take: There are 10 things that people need. They probably desperately want five of them from their relationship. The other five are less important. Some of those may be moderately important. One or two of them they can probably take or leave. Here are the 10 things:

Admiration
Affection
Conversation
Domestic support
Family commitment
Financial support
Honesty/openness
Physical attractiveness
Recreational companionship
Sexual fulfillment

In the case of a Christian dating relationship where there isn’t sex going on, I lump the more physical aspects of the relationship into sexual fulfillment. A short kiss is probably affection, as is a hug. A really long kiss is probably sexual, especially if accompanied with a passionate embrace. So some degree of sexual fulfillment goes on in very nearly every romantic relationship.

Now, here’s something that I noticed. Say a girlfriend comes over a few times before I got off work to cook dinner or clean the kitchen. I appreciate it. It’s work I don’t have to do myself. But I’d be happier just to see her–she could have been sitting in a chair reading a book when I came in and I would have been just about as appreciative.

If she really wanted me to feel special, all she really needed to do was read my Web site occasionally and take an interest in some of my writing–just checking in once a week and reading the non-computer stuff would have been great. That would have meant more to me, even though it’s probably less work. Why? Admiration is my #1. Domestic support is my #9.

So here’s the idea. Take that list, and then figure out if you could only have one of those 10 things from your significant other, which would it be. That’s your #1. Then figure out if you could only have two of them, and so on. Rank them, all the way down to #10. Have your significant other do the same, then share your lists.

If, like me, you’ve learned that making someone else happy makes you happy, you’ve just uncovered what ought to be the secret of the most incredible relationship ever. When you try to do things for your significant other, concentrate on things that fall into their top 5 categories. You’ll score more points than if you hit things on their lower five. (Harley talks about the concept of scoring points with your significant other in his piece The Love Bank.)

If you’ve ever found yourself muttering, “Boy, I sure didn’t score very many points on that one,” you’ve probably noticed that men and women tend to have some opposite needs and wants, and we tend to do things for our significant other that we appreciate ourselves when we’re trying to make them happy, and that often causes us to hit low on the scale. Then they don’t notice and we don’t feel appreciated. But things that involve one of the top five needs stand an excellent chance of being noticed and appreciated.

This principle can be applied instantly in a marriage or long-term dating situation. I don’t think it’s first-date material or even second-date material. But once the relationship has become one of committed and exclusive nature and the newness has started to wear off, it would be a perfect time to bring it in.

Harley talks about a lot of other things, but this struck me as the jewel. It seems to me that if nearly any couple were to rank their needs, then concentrate really hard on meeting one another’s top fives, the importance of the aggravating things about the relationship would diminish very quickly. Have you ever found anything that knocks the rough edges off a person as quickly and effectively as a satisfying, unconditional kind of love, when reciprocated effectively?

Heading back to Way Back When for a day

Dave Farquhar Personal , , , , , , , , , , , ,

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.
It was like walking into a time warp in a lot of ways. There’s an old Zenith console TV in the living room. My aunt and uncle had one very similar to it when I was in grade school, and it spent several years in the basement after it lost its job in the family room. First there was an Atari 2600 connected to it, and later a Nintendo Entertainment System. My cousin and I used to spend hours playing Pole Position and Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out and various baseball games down there.

The living room housed a modern JVC TV, armed with a modern Sony DVD player and RCA VCR. But in the other corner was a stereo. The Radio Shack Special 8-track player was the stereotypical 1970s/early 1980s brushed metal look, as was the graphic equalizer. The tuner was also a Radio Shack special, styled in that mid-1980s wanna-be futuristic style. If you lived through that time period, you probably know what I’m talking about. But if you’re much younger than me, you’re probably shrugging your shoulders. Beneath it was a Panasonic single-disc CD player in that same style, and a Pioneer dual tape deck. A very nice pair of Fisher speakers finished it off. It was definitely a setup that would have turned heads 17 years ago. (I have to wonder if the Fishers might not have been added later.)

It seems like there are only two genres of music capable of being emitted by an 8-track player. Once genre includes Led Zeppelin and Rush. The other includes John Denver, Rod Stewart, Barry Manilow and The Carpenters. Their collection was on the latter side, which sent my curiosity scurrying off elsewhere.

But I had to try out that stereo. I kind of like The Carpenters, but I have to be in the mood for them, and I’ve heard enough John Denver and Rod Stewart and Barry Manilow to last me forever. So I checked out the CDs. Their CD collection was an interesting mix, but with a good selection of contemporary Christian (albeit mostly pretty conservative contemporary Christian). I popped in a CD from Big Tent Revival. I don’t remember the title, but the disc was from 1995 and featured the song “Two Sets of Joneses,” which I still hear occasionally on contemporary Christian radio today.

About three measures into the disc, I understood why they hadn’t replaced that setup with something newer. It blew my mind. I heard a stereo that sounded like that once. In 1983, we moved to Farmington, Mo., which was at the time a small town of probably around 6,000. We lived on one side of the street. Our neighbor across the street owned the other side of the street. Any of you who’ve lived in small midwestern towns know what I mean when I say he owned the town.

Well, in addition to owning the biggest restaurant and catering business and tool rental business in town and a gas station, he also owned a mind-blowing stereo system. Hearing this one took me back.

I almost said they don’t make them like that anymore. Actually they do still make stereo equipment like that, and it costs every bit as much today as it cost in 1985.

And Big Tent Revival sounded good. If I’m ever out and see that disc, it’s mine.

Upstairs in one of the bedrooms, I spied a bookshelf. It was stocked with books of Peanuts cartoons, but also tons and tons of books I remember reading in grade school. Books by the likes of Beverly Cleary and Judy Blume, and books by other people that I remember reading 15 or even 20 years ago. The only things I didn’t remember seeing were S.E. Hinton and Paul Zindel, but as I recall, those books hit me so hard at such a period in my life that I didn’t leave those books at home. Or maybe Hinton and Zindel were a guy thing. I’m not sure. But seeing some of the names that made me want to be a writer, and being reminded of some of the others, well, it really took me back.

Next to that bookshelf was a lamp. Normally there’s nothing special about a lamp, but this lamp was made from a phone. This reminded me of my dad, because Dad went through a phase in life where there were exactly two kinds of things in this world: Things you could make a lamp from, and things you couldn’t make a lamp from. Well, this was a standard-issue wall-mount rotary phone from the pre-breakup AT&T Monopoly days. One just like it hung in my aunt and uncle’s kitchen well into the 1980s.

The computer was modern; a Gateway Pentium 4 running Windows Me. It desperately needed optimizing, as my Celeron-400 running Win98 runs circles around it. Note to self: The people who think Optimizing Windows was unnecessary have never seriously used a computer. But I behaved.

I don’t even know why I’m writing about this stuff. I just thought it was so cool.

But I remember long ago I wrote a column in my student newspaper (I’d link to it but it’s not in the Wayback Machine), which was titled simply “Retro-Inactive.” Basically it blasted retro night, calling it something that people use to evoke their past because their present is too miserable to be bearable.

Then I considered the present. Then I thought about the 1980s. We had problems in the 1980s, but they were all overshadowed by one big one–the Soviet Union–that kept most of us from even noticing the others. We had one big problem and by George, we solved it.

So I conceded that given the choice between living in the ’90s or living in the ’80s, well, the ’80s sure were a nice place to visit. Just don’t expect me to live there.

I’m sure people older than me have similar feelings about the ’70s, the ’60s, the ’50s, and every other previous decade.

And I guess I was just due for a visit.

My adventures in bureaucracy

Dave Farquhar Personal ,

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.
My Dodge Neon died in my driveway a couple of days ago. Yesterday I paid a towing company to haul it off to the dealer so I could turn it in. The warranty was up 3,911 miles ago. Figures. (Now I feel better about having paid $700 extra to extend my Honda Civic’s warranty to 7 years/100,000 miles.)

That will be the last time I ever lease a car, by the way. Leases make sense when you want to always have a new car. I don’t. I can think of a few things that would make me happier than to still be driving that same Civic in 2018. But it’s not a very long list.

The cause of death turned out to be a broken o-ring, which caused the spark plug chambers to fill with oil. So I can’t exactly count it against the car. Fixing it still isn’t cheap though.

After watching my Neon get towed away, I took my new car off for its St. Louis-is-too-polluted emissions test. If St. Louis really wanted to fix its pollution problems, they’d extend the light-rail system out into the Missouri suburbs where people actually live, but too many people are convinced people (they usually use another word that I won’t repeat) will ride Metrolink in from East St. Louis and steal their big-screen TVs. More on that in a second.

My Civic failed the test. My gas cap was polluting too much. Yeah. Vehicles that get 12 miles to the gallon on the highway are fine, but my 38 MPG Civic with its factory gas cap causes too much pollution to be acceptable.

So I had to drive to Autozone (polluting all the way), spend $5.91 on a new gas cap for a year-old car, then drive back to the emissions station (polluting less all the way) and sit in line for 30 minutes with my engine running (does that pollution count?), and get tested again to prove the world was rid of the scourge of my substandard gas cap.

Yes sir. We’re more concerned in St. Louis about the damage caused by faulty gas caps on ULEV vehicles than we are about our lack of an effective light-rail system. But the good news is I now have three of the four pieces of paper I need to get my vehicle licensed legally. And you thought Missouri’s temporary 30-day tags were a courtesy. No sir. It’ll take you pretty close to that long to navigate the bureaucracy.

And finally I had someone come out to look at my hot water heater. Based on the serial number, it’s old enough to drive and probably got its license last month. (That might explain a couple of those mysterious dings in the Neon.) He replaced a couple of 16-year-old parts, which will hopefully stop its leaking, which will hopefully cause my monthly gas bill to descend from the stratosphere. If I were paying the bill, I’d have just replaced the thing, but my home warranty means someone else makes the decisions.

It was a fine day. Or something.

Love can mend your life but love can break your heart

Dave Farquhar Personal

I’m sending out an S.O.S. to the world.
–The Police
I can’t quite go into the detail that I would like to go into. I don’t feel like I’m being true to myself because I’ve always been completely open on this site, writing without regard to much of anything other than what I feel like writing.

Well, for the past 7 months that’s been different, since I’ve had a close personal relationship with a girl. I don’t want to air our dirty laundry in public. She’s never expressed any interest in my writing, but I know some people close to her sometimes read here. I’ve mentioned her a few times, I don’t think ever by name, and never with much explicit detail.

On Monday, she was ready to break up with me. On Tuesday, I had my mind made up that I was going to break up with her. Then at the 11th hour, after praying about it, I had an epiphany that made me change my mind and want to give things one last chance.

For most of Tuesday night, I was happy that there was a glimmer of hope for us. But during our two-hour conversation, she admitted to something I’ve long suspected. She implied–I don’t think she said it outright–that it was a one-time event. Right now I’m thinking more about that than about the good things, so the pendulum has swung to the other side. It does that a lot lately.

But I love that girl. I love her more than anything else in this world, and I don’t give a rat’s red behind what anyone else thinks about that. I do care who knows it. I want everyone to know it. And it hurts when I think that those feelings might not be mutual anymore. Well, I know from that thing that she admitted to that those feelings aren’t mutual all the time.

There was a time when she told me she’d never met another guy like me. A little over a month ago, she gave me a card that said she wondered what she’d ever done to deserve someone as wonderful as me.

I’ve made myself out to be a martyr here. That’s wrong. I’ve screwed up too. But I will say this and I’ll take it to my grave: Everything I did was out of motivation to fix what I already knew was broken, and out of desperation of knowing nothing else would work. But, like some War of the Roses general whose name I can’t recall once said, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

I wept bitterly when I got home from work Tuesday night. I’ve cried a lot the past three days or so. I can go a couple of years without shedding a tear. But one of my mentors once told me my biggest problem is that I’m not willing to grieve. So when I need to grieve, grieve. So I have been. Not every time I cried was about her. I miss my dad. I’d love to hear his thoughts on a lot of the stuff that’s going on right now. I wouldn’t let him make any decisions for me, but there are times when Dad’s advice is what you want more than anything else in the world. I have to live without. He died in 1994, aged 51. I was 19. We only talked about women five or six times, so I don’t even have the benefit of playing through old tapes in my head to try to mine for his wisdom and experience in this case. And that hurts.

She doesn’t like it when I cry. Men look pathetic when they cry, she says. I think she’s full of crap. Norman Schwarzkopf cried on national TV when Barbara Walters interviewed him. She told him real men don’t cry. He said yes they do. I think Gen. Schwarzkopf qualifies as a real man.

I’m not going to bottle things up inside so they can eat me up just because she’s decided that real men cry twice in their lives and I’ve more than used up my quota over the course of a week. Like I said, I can go years without crying. If she doesn’t like it that I have strong feelings and emotions about her, well, that’s her problem. There are plenty of girls who would love to have a guy cry about them just once in their lives.

Actually, I hear there are plenty of girls who would love to have a guy who prefers church to bars, who treat them like royalty, who set out to make their dreams come true when they’re willing to share them, who misses them when away, and who more often than not picks up the phone on the second ring when they call and is almost always excited to talk to them, even though it doesn’t quite always show.

I’ve always had a hard time finding those girls, but supposedly there are 169 singles in my church. One of those is me. Experience tells me the majority of the rest are women. I felt guilty on Sunday when I started looking. There was one in the row right behind me, about five or six seats to my left. And there was one sitting front row center. All I did was look. I shouldn’t feel guilty. But I do.

I don’t want just any girl. Even if I met her in the perfect place, which, as far as I’m concerned, is church. I’ve been praying for a faithful Christian wife off and on since I got interested in girls. So I guess that would mean since about 1987. The girl I really want is the one I’ve already got.

An hour ago I woke up, glad that I’d put her picture away sometime on Tuesday, because I didn’t want to look at her. Not even a likeness of her.

But now that I’ve thought about the things we’ve been through, and how much I’ve invested in her, not just emotionally but monetarily, I know I don’t want to give up on her just yet.

But if she gives up on me, that girl who was sitting front-row center will be there next Sunday. She’s there more Sundays out of the year than our pastor is. I actually got up the nerve to talk to her a couple of times. The last time was a year ago. I think most guys are intimidated by her. She is, after all, everything you’re supposed to look for and then some.

But I can make a case that so is the girl I’ve been seeing.

We’ll see how I’m feeling at a reasonable hour.

I took the plunge. I bought a Civic.

Dave Farquhar Personal ,

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.
It’s a bit showy for me–it’s got a sunroof, I mean moonroof, whatever the difference is, for Pete’s sake–but hey, I’m still fairly young and it’ll be fun. And it’s costing me less than my Neon, so I can afford it.

And when I no longer have use for it–it’ll be a number of years–I can sell it to a wannabe homey and still get four figures for it. Apparently the Civic is a favorite model to put ground effects and move-to-the-music groovin’ shocks and other, umm, things. I won’t be finding out firsthand. But I did notice the trunk is certainly big enough for a bass tube. So I could turn my latest–and it’d better be my last for a long time–major purchase into a groovemobile and introduce south St. Louis County to David Crowder.

Hey, it’s mission work.

I’m kidding. I hope you know that.

Anyway, like I said, I’m hoping this is my last major purchase for a long time.

Maintaining a healthy distance

Dave Farquhar Personal

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!”
Microsoft is my least favorite software company and has been for years. But once I had to deal with Backup Exec on a daily–who am I kidding?–nightly basis, Veritas quickly rocketed past Network Associates and Adobe to get the #2 spot.

To anyone else struggling with Backup Exec, I offer this bit of advice: Tell the first PHB who comes around that you’d be working on it if you weren’t busy talking to him or her, then take your phone off the hook and deal with the problem one backup job at a time. Better yet, narrow it down to one directory at a time. Keep in mind that Backup Exec seems to subscribe to the domino theory–one failure causes eight. OK, two or three. And if Backup Exec is flagging jobs as failures because it can’t back up the DHCP database, then exclude the DHCP database. If you have to do a restore and that file’s gone, the OS will regenerate it. It’s easier to explain that to the PHBs than it is repeated failures. If they insist on 100% identical hot backups, tell them they’re going to have to swallow hard and buy you a SAN with snapshot capability. If they don’t have $50,000 laying around, I can come up with creative ways to get it–eliminating a layer or two of management would probably pay for several SANs–but I don’t know of a tactful way to say that.

If I seem a bit disconnected these days, I am. A few weeks ago I realized I was letting a Microsoft lackey from Utah with all the class of that thing you find behind a horse’s tail set my agenda. And I decided I wouldn’t let him set my agenda, or anyone else, for that matter. And I quit looking at my site statistics. And I haven’t even looked at comments since Saturday.

Daily hits are nice, and they’re great for the ego. But prime time for writing used to start around 9 pm. That also happens to be the time when my girlfriend can call me for free. So guess what budged? I’ll adjust eventually, but that’s not all that’s changed. A year ago, I’d ask myself several times a week what I was going to write about the next day. I never ask myself that question anymore. Nowadays I sit down and write when I’ve found something interesting, or I do what I’m doing now–force myself to sit down and write something, anything.

And of course, on the nights when she comes over or we go out, I don’t write anything.

So I’m not writing my best-ever content these days, but it’s because I have other priorities. That includes keeping the girlfriend happy, but truth be told, I’m at least as happy writing a Wikipedia entry as I’ve ever been writing stuff here. So a lot of energy that would normally go here goes elsewhere. Cracking the upper ranks of Technorati or another blogging community just isn’t high on my priority list anymore, if it ever was.

But I’m still in my 20s, and I’m still just as moody as I’ve ever been. Everything’s subject to change with as little notice as St. Louis weather patterns.

I know this will be interpreted as me saying I quit, so let me make one thing clear: I don’t quit. I may or may not write something tomorrow (I probably will). But if I don’t, I’ll be back later in the week. And I might even read comments that time.