We had a blackout at home yesterday morning! It was a real nasty “down then up immediately” one.

It took down ALL of the computers. Only one came back up cleanly!
Igloo the firewall came back unable to detect one of it’s network cards — hence no internet for the rest of the network.
Pingu powered back up, but didn’t actually boot! Pingo, my machine and the newest, came back up but couldn’t detect the keyboard!
At least I could laugh at the “No keyboard detected. Press F1 to continue” message 🙂
I’m not sure what happened to Pinga — Jan was at home at the time. She phoned me at work, but she’d already re-started the PC by that time.
Pingi wasn’t powered up at the time and didn’t notice. And finally greenland is in pieces in a cardboard box, so it definitely wasn’t affected.

I just found out tonight that it fried the NTL digital cable box. But only the TV side. Broadband Internet connection is still working. They are coming to fit a new one tomorrow morning.

This seems to be a lesson in using old equipment. The old ones seem to fare better in brownouts. Pingu did not notice the last two, whereas Pingo rebooted. But they all did badly in the blackout.

At least no costly permanent damage occurred. (the NTL digital box doesn’t count coz they’ll replace it).

Later days…
Mike

Not blogged for a couple of days now. Too lazy or too tired. Not sure which.
Anyway, to catch up. At work I’m still working on the same document I’ve been working on for the last work week!
At home, pingu is still not fully recovered. He’s now running Mandrake 8.2, but I’ve not configured him properly and I haven’t restored all my backed-up data.
I’ve not worked on my J2EE project for a few days now. I really need to get my a**e in gear!

On a positive note, I’ve just finished “A Practical Guide to eXtreme Programming” by David Astels et al. published by Prentice Hall. An excellent book. If you are looking in to XP then this is a good book. I’m very excited (sad, I know) and would love to start working on some of these practices.

More to come

Mike

Damn! Two am. Gotta get to bed. Work in the morning. Too much time spent chatting with Steve in Trillian.

Adios

Mike

New style.
I’ve managed to furtle with the style sheet and come up with a new look.
I started with Rob Chandanais’ layout 3 from http://bluerobot.com/web/layouts/layout3.html and adapted it somewhat.

Another day nearly done.
I spent most of the work day fire fighting, instead of planned work.
A new release of the code. Halted for a last minute bug.
Bug fixing interrupted for a meeting (a productive one for a change) and
then back to the bug. Found it, fixed it. Finished the release.
None of which was directly related to the document I was supposed to finish!

I’m gonna take a look at Linux from scratch before I retire for night. I think Pingu
(one of my servers) is a likely candidate for linux from scratch.

Later days,
Mike

My first b2 post.
There will either be nothing here or a collection of random thoughts and links.
Nothing too exciting. But then again I’m not an exciting person ;-).

Later,
Mike