Gnurple dot Net

From the delayed-response department:

Well. It figures that I would go and talk about resolving to write in here everyday and then immediately fail to do so. I suck. Time to talk about:

* The weekend
* The Gnurple.Netwinder

THE WEEKEND

Saturday totally rocked my world. Sunday was lame as all hell. I guess the world maintains a balance. On Saturday I headed up to my favourite place in the whole world with a good friend. The purpose of the trip was to return my pop-up trailer to its home. No, wait. The purpose of the trip was to have GoodTimes^TM with my friend. The excuse was to return the trailer. Sunday was totally lame because I did absolutely none of the stuff that I should have done.

Saturday

* Changed tires on the trailer
* Marveled at how much easier it is to loosen the nuts before jacking the trailer up
* Stood in awe of good fortune that old tires did not blow out as well on last trip, given that large chunks of their rubber are missing
* Moved kayak from roof rack of car to trailer
* Grabbed quick shower
* Picked up good friend at 10h00 (yay!)
* Return home to attach trailer and pack some food
* Note that we are now officially running late
* Got gas for car, air for pair of trailer tires, Gatorade for pair of people (Gatorade apparently comes in colours, not flavours)
* Noted that, for the first time in my life, the “$” number is incrementing faster than the “L” number at the gas station pump
* Picked up remainder of food at grocery store across road from gas station
* Hit the road almost two hours behind planned schedule
* Entered warp zone where more than a half-hour is mysteriously gained and where sets of four doors come out of the woodwork to display themselves for our viewing pleasure
* Day is officially declared Four Door Day
* Vast set of punnery ensues. Participants become unhinged as they fail to get a handle on outburst of puns.
* I used the phrase “latchkey kid” for the first time in my life
* Arrived at cottage after noting unhappiness with 1.9L 4cyl. engine at hauling heavy trailer up steep hills
* Trailer manhandled into resting position, tarped, then weighted down with various bits of tree to prevent tarp from forming alliance with wind to effect escape

* Lunch is prepared, served and devoured
* Obligatory jump in the lake #1 performed by yours truly, followed by mandatory dry-out period in hammock
* Observed neighbours having way too much fun with towing their kids behind motorboat in screaming delight
* Kayak trip is begun
* Yours truly performed required balance failure followed by dunk in lake within two minutes of entering vessel
* Visit neighbours to say hello and for yours truly to attempt removal of water from vessel
* Neighbours expressed great friendliness and offered us the opportunity to have fun with them later on
* Journey to explore part of lake began
* Attempts to traverse river leading out of lake thwarted by shallow waters despite much bouncing, wiggling and attempts to manipulate position by oar and hand
* Returned to cottage
* Noted exceptional improvement in kayaking skills from beginning to end of trip by friend. Wondered if this is really friend’s first time playing in kayaks
* Second obligatory jump in lake performed by yours truly. Mandatory dry-out period in hammock thwarted due to occupation by friend. Attempts to sit in plastic chair balanced precariously on rock were mostly successful
* Noticed neighbours beginning endeavours to have fun with motorboat again
* Accepted neighbours’ hospitality with arrangement of lake tour after neighbour attempts to dunk his visiting friend in the lake by way of extreme erratic boat navigation while trailing visiting friend on floating tube/raft thingy
* Yours truly declines to try floating tube/raft thingy after visiting friend describes the exhaustion and pummeling and loss of shorts that visiting friend has just experienced
* Yours truly regrets decision and makes mental resolution to come back and try this fun and exciting activity after either finding a better pair of swimming shorts or a rope/string to prevent their loss
* Neighbour takes us on a tour of the lake
* Yours truly remembers the fun that is Sandy Beach and resolves to return to the cottage with specific intent to go and have fun with friends at Sandy Beach. Yours truly notes the ideal nature of said beach, specifically its shallowness and abundance of sandy bottom, for activities such as tossing football or frisbee around
* Yours truly notes abrupt tense change (nb: tense the noun, not tense the adjective) in above description and bemoans poor writing skills

Sunday

What I wanted to do on Sunday: mow the lawn; weed; change kitty litter; give myself a haircut; write in this lame blog; fix netwinder. What I actually ended up doing: watched a couple of episodes of Star Trek; ate lunch; took a nap; changed kitty litter; started the latest Harry Potter book.

THE GNURPLE.NETWINDER

Before I moved to my new house I had originally planned for my internet and all my services to be down for less than 24 hours. It has been one month to this day that my services have been down — although if you read my earlier blogs you’d know that it only took half a month to get my internet back, woohoo!

I use a Netwinder as well as a couple of other machines to provide a number of services for myself and for friends, including websites, photo galleries, IRC (including web interface), forums, mail, ftp and some storage and other services.

When I made my move, one of the two hard disk drives in my Netwinder died. Died in a horrible click-click-click noises, can’t-spin-up kind of way. Toast sees this dead drive coming and crosses to the other side of the street. That drive had the OS on it. The other drive — the one that still works — has most of my data.

What you should know about the Netwinder, if you’re not a Linux geek, is that it has no removable media - no floppy, no CDROM, etc. I spent some time last week trying to recover it by BOOTPing a kernel but it seems that it can’t load the ramdisk. Yesterday, though, I discovered that somebody (maybe even me!) put a rescue partition on the new drive. Today I might just be able to install an OS on the Netwinder, which is half the battle to restoring my geeky computer network at home.

Someday I’ll even have my personal mail again.

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