On the one hand, it turned out not to be the great damage that I thought. I simply had to think a little bit harder about how the grub.conf should look. I didn't have one for reference, as far as I knew, so I was sort of in the dark. If someone could have told me, "your grub.conf is definitely the problem, fix it" I could have read the info page or something more carefully and done it quickly. Well, I got there eventually. Didn't have to reinstall to get it booting as planned.
On the other hand, the fact that the grub.conf from the other system didn't work is indirectly a problem, and means we will have to reinstall the system in order to make it look like the other one. So it's not as if I saved the day. Ho-hum.
Well, I certainly have not been a credit to the Linux community of late. I came up with the harebrained scheme of building a custom kernel for the Red Hat "Advanced Server" machines we have to ship, so that port bonding can work. And I went and built a custom kernel, and it worked, so I thought, "why not tar that up and just throw that on every system? Well, I don't know what happened, but the first system we tried that on didn't like that at all. It disliked it so much, in fact, that it refused to boot even with the old kernel. Something couldn't mount something anymore. Now it looks like we have to reinstall the whole bloody system.
And I was an idiot twice the next day. I took Henry to Rockville to pick up his car. I left my lights on -- on purpose, believe it or not, thinking it wouldn't be long -- and the battery drained. Then, after telling Henry what an idiot he was for having to ask me which clamp to hook to which terminal on his battery when the clamps were clearly labeled, I ignored the labels on the clamps on my end of the cable and hooked them up wrong on my own battery. Couldn't recharge the battery after that (or, couldn't start the car anyway), had to wait 1.5 hours to get towed, then another hour to get served at Sears, where the new battery was in place before they discovered the problem was the fuse :-\
Well, today (yesterday (really, the day before)) was the biggest snowstorm of the year. And Henry was out driving at 10 P.M. on Sunday night and crashed into a snowbank. He couldn't get his car out, and has been completely frantic ever since. Finally got his car towed out of the snowbank, but the tower decided to take the car to his holding lot in Rockville instead of back to Greenbelt.
Henry helped me mostly dig my car out, but I don't know if there will be enough room to maneuver out; the plows cleared a path just wide enough for cars to travel through, but not really wide enough, it seems to me, to turn out of the parking slots onto that path.
Henry also cooked me dinner. Henry also monopolized most of my waking hours. Sigh.
I'm in the middle (not really sure how long I should take) of this on-line self-help thing (Innerpeace). It asks you to enter a prayer. It tells you to FEEL the prayer. Then, when you hit the submit, it asks you to imagine the prayer being answered, and describe how that feels. And it goes on.
Some devious person could be trying to read my thoughts through this. After all, I am submitting it over the Internet, right? They could, right? It seems so unlikely that anyone would find this worth their while, and even if they did, and even if they somehow managed to trace it back to me, how would I really be harmed?
Still, I felt reluctant to do it. Part of the reason was that it was, in fact, a prayer. Initially, I thought, "why not, let's just see what it does". But I didn't want to put gobbledygook in there, so I tried to make something based on my experience today when, for the first time possibly since making the decision to stop going to church, I felt an instinctive/reflexive desire to pray. So anyway, again, it was a prayer. To whom? I wrote it to something like "protector of all souls", but what if God (as I was told about Him) really exists and is watching? Would He (I'm using the capitalized pronouns, just to be on the safe side :-) find it blasphemous? Or would he recognize it as a true prayer to him, even if I didn't realize it myself? Well, if the latter, I guess I'd be safe, but what about the former? And if there is no God, as is my current belief, then what the hell am I doing? If I'm making an effort to come up with these words, am I being untrue to my belief?
I'm not sure how clearly I can make the connection between the religious/philosophical aspect of this and the "being watched" part.... I guess I've always felt like that Michael Jackson song. Everything I do, there's some passive spirit that knows how to see the good in me, and is always hoping for the best for me. But what is this spirit thinking when it sees me type?
OK, here's where I really think I'm going; the page is telling me to type things... and then to FEEL things. Although I don't think I believe there is any real person or spirit that will recognize that I am doing what the page tells me to do.... I am distrustful. I don't want to try to feel what someone is telling me to feel. Why not? If I were happy and someone wanted me to feel sad, I suppose I would want to tell that person to buzz off, but other than that, why not? Why do I so hate being manipulated, and why do I feel as if trying to feel what something tells me to feel is manipulation?
Coincidentally, today Henry, as usual, decided what we were going to talk about. After phone conversations with 3 different people, he said, "conversation is hard. Let's practice. I'm a woman and you're you, and we're on a date. You go first".
Part of my not liking that was my usual dislike of how Henry likes to tell me to do something, right now, rather than asking if I'm interested in doing what he wants. But the other is... I don't know, the forced conversation. The pretending. We had to make up our own conversations in class sometimes in the Army, most noticeably at DLI, but sometimes in other schools, and everyone hated it. No one wanted to be a drama person, everyone felt it was embarrassing, somehow. Why?
OK, I think it's time to give up this entry, and think about going back to the self-help.
Is this "journal" or "news"? Gotta figure out what these categories are for.
Wasted much of today updating all those config files. Wrote a BST in Java, with the idea of making it into a threaded program. Sort of didn't get around to the threading part. Hopefully tomorrow. Otherwise it will have been a most fruitless effort, except that I can rejoice in the fact that I made a BST in -- really probably longer than most people would really consider impressive, but say 1.5 hours.
Finally joined the vaunted nerve.com. It didn't make me happy. Would you believe how many women are looking for self-confident men who have their shit together and know what they want in life? It's not a pretty picture.
Took my laptop into work yesterday and managed to get it on the network. Seems I'm not allowed to reach the IMAP ports of outside servers, so I have to start thinking about using POP for my speakeasy. I hate Telemann, which is about to be played on the radio. Well anyway. I was able to ssh into the various linux boxen at work, but I don't have telnet installed ATM, so I couldn't get to the Sun boxen. I wanted to NFS mount my dev't directory from the workstation where I develop Epoch, so I could build it on my box without having to go tarring stuff up, and dealing with the fact that some utilities required for building are not under my home directory. But I couldn't mount; I suspect it has something to do with RPC. So I tarred it all up somehow, and transferred it, and -- it compiled! I couldn't start a stream, though (that's a special kind of program that my company's software runs), and it was also complaining about something to do with RPC. Well, I just installed portmap, which I think has to do with RPC, so we'll see if that helps. But anyway, I did get two of the programs to run (one a Motif app), so that's cool! I feel like putting the binaries out on the net and seeing if anyone with a satellite sets themselves up a Linux-PPC box just to use this no-license binary :)
Wow, I didn't even know you had been in the military and/or Korea. Married? Kids?No, and though I have no idea what it's like, if I were I'm sure I would have told you!!!
The pisser about that entry is that I missed the chance to post that on Groundhog Day. I had typed it up several days earlier, in fact, after an inspiration struck me in that place where most of the best inspirations hit -- that's right, the shower. And I stupidly decided to hold on to it, so that I could post it on a separate day, rather than making a whole buttload of entries on the 2nd and not having anything to say the next day. See, I wanted to get my calendar to show more than one day of usage as quickly as possible.
If someone you've never seen before walks up to you and greets you by your name, tell him that's not your name. He might be like that guy in Groundhog Day who keeps living the same day over and over again, and maybe he already met you yesterday, even though in your world you never met him. You don't want him to get all smug about knowing your name. Also, if he greets you with the wrong name, tell him it's wrong, but then tell him a different name. Because maybe the wrong name that he used was the name you told him yesterday.
If he uses your real name and insists on sticking with it, he probably mugged you yesterday for your wallet and looked inside it. In this case, there's not much you can do about it but try to make sure you can see both his hands at all times.
Just took a look at Henry's blog, and I was struck by how much more 1337 mine looked. I still dig that dark background that doesn't look lame the way something I coded myself would look. Plus I don't have all that sappy religious stuff :)
성공 됐다! I finally figured out how to do it! Henry didn't know; turned out he had been doing the same thing I did! So I told him. For posterity, I've chosen the style sheet supplied by MT called "Trendy", with its dark background and sans serif fonts. Maybe a few years from now, when my blog has gone mainstream, I'll have sold out to the Man and gone back to the conventional black-on-white-or-near-white scheme. Anyway, I like this.
Well, it seems that every time I create a new entry, it re-writes the styles-site.css file -- and all the other files in that directory. Ain't that useless. So my main page looks crappy again. Guess I have to ask Henry anyway.
My new style sheet is, as that weird character in one episode of Stargate who made surgical improvements on the SG-1 crew without their permission or knowledge would say, "better". I had to just steal it from Henry's site. Will have to ask him how his got to be as it is. Don't think he's that much of a genius with CSS, or industrious enough to do that himself.
Well, at least I got some sort of stylesheet working on my site. Don't know why it doesn't look like Henry's, though.