First, before I begin the topics at hand, I'd like to make a note or two about last night's review of the Xena Premiere: (a) Obviously, my sometimes-held theory that there are no Xenites in the audience of this web page has been proven wrong, and (b) what fell apart in the fourth act last night was not the show, but Bitscape's brain. A review of the handy tape I made revealed that there was indeed a brief shot showing Gabrielle rescuing Eve from the Amazon encampment. Also, the change in terrain, while quite rapid, was indeed shown as Xena and Ares rode their horses upward into mountains. I'm gonna have to watch the whole thing again, next time with the brain turned on throughout the episode.

However, today I have formed a theory: the problem with the ending wasn't how it was done. The problem was that it was done. That's right. We don't need no stinkin ending. Just the episode go on and on. The Amazons don't need no closure. Ares doesn't need to stop his goofy, hilarious, Furies-inspired antics. They should just keep on going. At least three hours would be about right. Every episode, every week. Well, a Xenite can dream, can't he? ;)

Now, for the big news. The funeral. Today, I was given the unexpected surprise of having to arrange, conduct, and perform the ceremony, as well as the autopsy. It all started with a tragic death, sometime in the early morning. (Theorists put it as being around 0630, when the cron jobs ran, but this remains unproven.) Whose death, you might ask? The death of a great soul, though its spirit lives on in the processing of these words. I'm talking about the death of Dagobah.

When I first awoke just after 0700 and hobbled over to the console, things appeared fine. Argo's desktop was all hunky dory. Until I tried to type something into one of the ssh xterms to Dagobah. Then I knew something was wrong. mutt. No response. No keystrokes echoed. A look at Dagobah's hard drive activity light reveald that it was on solid. Not good.

In a diagnosis attempt, I plugged the monitor into Dagobah, and saw exactly what I expected: A screen full of i/o errors from /dev/hda. Soft reboot. Kernel panic on bootup. Hard reboot. Same thing. Tried switching the IDE cable, which had seemed to mysteriously work on a previous occassion when there were similar symptoms. Not this time. The init process was unable to load.

Then, Bitscape did an odd thing: "Well, this sucks. It's too early in the morning. I'm going back to bed." Indeed, several more hours of sleep were forthcoming.

Bitscape awoke, thoughts bleary. The clock read 10:45. A much more appropriate time to wake up and face things. A check on the Lounge revealed that to my great surprise (Yes, Bitscape knows it's bad style to switch between first and third person, but he does it sometimes anyway. Just like he uses more parentheses than he probably should.), to my great surprise, that a local content vulture other than myself had not only watched the premiere, but had apparently been paying better attention than I had. Hah!

Well, I decided Dagobah was a lost cause. This had been coming for a long time. It had not been without warning. I took out the hard drive, opened Argo's case, and proceeded to perform a knowledge transfusion. The / partition seemed to have the most problems. I finally gave up on fsck-ing it, after sitting through nearly 20 minutes of errors to the console about Uncorrectable errors. The home partition was salvaged with almost no loss. (I had already backed up most of the stuff in my home directory to Argo a couple weeks ago, as a precaution against just such an event.) I got everyone's home directories. I'm doubtful that anyone with an account on the system other than myself stores anything of value, but it never hurts to be complete.

Got most of /var, as well as most of the /etc tree. The partition for /usr/local really didn't need it because I had backed it up a couple weeks ago and not changed much of anything since, but I copied it anyway. The /usr directory, which was part of the / partition, was completely inaccessable. Oh well. Nothing there that we really need anyway.

But the biggest problem, of course: The database. Obviously, it was going to need to be replicated on Argo, but what was the best way to go about it? I decided to not even bother with Dagobah's stuff. I might have been able to just blindly copy everything from the /var/lib/postgres directory, but that would mean getting the old Potato packages for postgres 6.x in order to be compatible. Better to just download postgres 7 and recreate it from scratch. But where to get the data? From Rage, of course! :)

And so I did. It really didn't turn out to be that hard. Given that I already had code which I had written to do the dump from Dagobah to Rage several months ago, I just modified it a little, and ran the process in reverse, piping it all through a happy little ssh tunnel. Without boring the readers with even more crazy details, I'll just say I had it the Lounge data on Argo shortly before I started typing this rambling. (Still don't have a local web interface though -- I need to configure Apache and get all my scripts in the right places.)

Of course, I was hardly working continuously on this all afternoon. Besides other minor complications on Argo, I took a trip with bouncing and mom to CompUSA. I had actually been planning to just go there myself at some point during the day, but when I found out they were planning the same thing, we decided to all proceed in one vehicle. (This vehicle does not have a name that I am aware of, because its owner has not adopted a Jaeger-style scheme of vehicle naming. Hmmmm.... I suppose if I were to take his example, I could make up a name for the vehicle and start calling it by that until the owner capitulates and gives it a name. Quite a diabolical idea, actually.)

Anyway, we proceeded to CompUSA, making a couple stops on the way for coffee and nachos. My mission: To obtain a new mouse. The one I've been using on Argo, which was inherited from Dagobah, has been getting increasingly unresponsive, despite my cleaning it with increasing frequency. I think it's all that Quake playing that does it. Anyway, I decided it was time for a new one. I was actually going to buy one last night on the Barnes and Noble trip, since CompUSA is right next door, but we were too late, and they had closed. So today was the day.

I knew I wanted a Logitech. I can actually afford those now. Always before, it's been the $20 or less cheapo off-brand kind. Those work alright, but they wear out. All too obvious. Argo deserves better.

The choice came down to two identically priced, identically shaped models: An optical with a cord, or a wireless with a ball? I told bouncing that what I really would like to have seen was a wireless optical. He pointed out that this might pose a slight problem for battery power. That's probably why they didn't have 'em.

I decided on the optical with a cord. Reasoning: (a) I'm tired of cleaning mouse balls and rollers. With this, there will be no more need for that. (b) No batteries to change. (c) It was a cool blue look. (Ok, so that was wasn't a big one, cause the cordless looked cool too, but I do like the color.)

I made the purchase. It took about a billion years to wait through line because their credit card verification system was down. Every person paying with plastic had to be processed using some archaic form of real-time analog audio communication technology. Doh! The happy bank account depletion card was getting impatient.

bouncing bought the Red Hat 7.0 boxed set and a new network card for Scully. Despite the recent rash of warnings about its stability (or lack thereof), he decided RH7 was the distro to go with. May it work well for him.

We headed back home, and I tried the new mouse on Argo. The basic functionality worked instantly, out of the box. I thought I might need to do some stuff in my XF86Config, but apparently not. I might have to employ a little hackery to get the roller working though. I'll have to investigate.

I love the mouse, the ergonmic feel, and the optical tracking rocks. I do have one complaint, however: When you turn out the lights, and try to sit at the computer in the dark, that big blue light with the Logitech logo glows almost as bright as my monitor. Very distracting. For now, I've covered it with an old stamp, but that doesn't look very elegant. There must be a better way to get rid of that annoying blue dot in the corner of my eye. Electrical tape, maybe. That would still be ugly. Hmmmm..

I worked on getting Argo up to speed on performing all of Dagobah's old tasks. Around 1630 I remembered another item I should have bought while we were done there: blank VHS tapes. I need some more. But no bother. A quick trip to Safeway, and I was supplied, 10 minutes before the Andromeda premiere.

And now, I will attempt, for the third time in the past 24 hours, to review the premiere of a worthwhile television show. (Would I really watch anything other than worthwhile shows? Who, me? Never. Only the best for this viewer.)

Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda. How shall I summarize? I think the words, "It ROCKS!" would work. This is definitely a cool show. Kevin Sorbo as Captain Dylan Hunt. (Here's the link to the official site, which is how I made sure I spelled that correctly.)

It's always hard to decide just how much to reveal in these reviews, because if I put myself in the shows of a reader who has not yet seen it, I usually would want to know as little of the story as possible prior to viewing it for myself. I'll say this: the first episode introduces a setting that looks like very promising territory for some quality scifi television. Heck, it is quality scifi television. I'm on the edge of my seat for next week. So far, a great story, awesome cast, and some very lovely space visuals. We're talking Star Trek++ here. I am already a fan.

Well, this place is a mess. I'm gonna try to straighten things up a bit around here, as well as throw together some code to sync this rambling to Rage. Here's to a very event-filled Sunday.