Well, the Bertha project is ending with a fizzle instead of a bang. After carefully looking at the sizes of the usable spaces in the cabinet, plus a strong veto vote from She Who Must Be Obeyed, Bertha is basically just going to be a cabinet. The servers are going to be located in the enpty space left by the removal of the lower drawer, and the upper drawer will serve for storage space. The tabletop will hold the printer, and I won't be installing a real terminal server - instead, I'll just use a standard KVM switch at some point. Besides, as I pointed out before, I can do just about anything I need to through SSH anyway.

I admit, I'm a little disappointed. It would have been a fun project. But, ultimately it wouldn't be useful enough - I'd have to retain almost all of the case structure and rebuild the lower drawer - and it would take a lot of work to get to that point for something that wouldn't provide any additional funtionality. There are plenty of other projects that I'm thinking about which will provide much greater returns - in funtionality and in interest - that I can spend the time on. I still want an iMac shell, for example. One of the original colors by preference. If you can get ahold of one cheap, email me. I promise to give credit to by benefactor, and post photos of the finished project.

My only question on that project is Goldfish or Tropical. But these are things that can be settled later. <G>

Interesting site to examine when you have a spare moment: Andamooka. A first attempt at open-sourcing content. So far, from what I've seen, the content is uneven - but it'll be interesting to see what happens over the next year or so.

That'll do it for me this evening; time to bind the wrists and get some sleep. Ciao.

Wednesday, May 23 - Sorry About That

My apologies. Friday night, I noticed I was having trouble holding on to a water glass. A short while later, I picked up a pen to scribble an error message (more on that in a moment) and found that not only could I not write clearly - nothing new, really - I couldn't hold the pen still. Anybody guessed the problem yet?

Anyway, I took the rest of the weekend off from the computer, instead spending the time reading analog-style (eeeew, hard copy...) and binding up my wrists at night with a couple of magnets tucked into the ace wrap. (The magnets are a trick Keri's Aunt Sue taught me for arthritis; they help increase blood flow, among other things. I'm not sure how it works, exactly - the iron in hemoglobin, perhaps? - but it does help.) By Monday, I felt much better, but I didn't want to risk too much typing until I'd seen a doctor. Sure enough, he's diagnosed Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, although a fairly mild case. Friday night was an anomoly, it's normally not that bad. He's prescibed more night splinting, and recommended a series of vitamins and exercises that should help. I feel much better now, and no, I'm not going to disappear. I have little choice but to type - ever try administrating command-line only systems without typing?? - but I am going to modify things a bit. My typing posture is unorthidox but relaxed - my wrists are straight and unbent, my arms and shoulders are relaxed - but now I'll be paying a bit more attention to it. I have wrist braces that allow me to type, and the doctor actually recommends typing in them - they'll hold my hands in the proper position, so hopefully I'll learn to use that position even when I'm not wearing the brace. I will be switching almost entirely to evening posts, I think; that way if I have a particularly bad wrist day, I can "spend" the day's typing on money-making keystrokes. Which means there will be occaisional disappearances, though I hope to avoid extended ones.

Anyway. The reason I needed the pen is that Minerva crashed. Repeatedly. Muttering comments along the lines of "didn't we just do this" and other, shorter, non-printable statements, I started debugging. I swapped out RAM. I tried a different video card. The symptoms worsened until I couldn't even make it through a system boot; the boot would fail somewhere after loading the IDE drivers but before starting to load the services, always with a kernel oops. So, I tried a different hard drive - same problem. Eventually, I'd literally swapped everything but the motherboard and processor. So, when I took off from work to go see the doctor, I ran down to the computer store and exchanged the motherboard. The problem changed somewhat, but it didn't improve. So, while I was at the doctor, Keri went down and swapped the processor - and now Minerva works again. The motherboard and processor both came from Computer Stop in Bellevue; although one or both of the components were defective (I believe it was just the processor, but I can't swear to it) they were extremely accomodating on the exchanges. Good service. They also answered Keri's questions about just what I was doing, and weren't even afraid to say "I don't know about that". Now THAT's a rarity.

Now for my first and last comment on the whole Kaycee situation. Well... I never had a link up here; not because I did not care, not because I did not occaisionally read the site, but simply because I chose not to. I have in the past mentioned friends and family going through tough times, illness or job loss or whatever; when I have, it's been short, simple, and usually a one-time thing. I didn't feel it was fair to but up a constant link and banner for this person I'd never met, when I hadn't done that for family. On the other hand, I can't say "I knew it, I told you so" - because I didn't. I might have had a couple of thoughts about how strange some point or item in her site was; but I never followed through, and I can't say I really suspected anything until the hoax was revealed. I felt bad when she "died", mainly for friends who were much closer to her than I. And now, she turns out not to have been real at all. Some make comments like "well, that's what I get for trusting someone online" or complaining about how foolish they feel for "wasting" these emotions on someone who never existed.

On the one hand, there's something to that; people fell in love, laughed, cried, and grieved for an unperson, the product of one woman's imagination. On the other hand, the emotions were real; the poetry was real; the friendship might even be said to have been real. OK, Kaycee never existed. Neither did Alice in Wonderland, Romeo, or Juliet. Yet many of us have felt love, pain, anger, or shared amusement with those fictional people. The situation is not the same, no. But the gripping hand is that the words on the site made you, the reader, feel something. Inspiration, pride, sadness, the need to go home and hug a loved one, even grief. Those emotions are not fake. Just as "'Tis better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all", it is better to have felt those emotions - and have Kaycee turn out not to be real - than to have never felt anything at all.