1999-09-07

[kragen@pobox.com (Kragen Sitaker)]

I got home on the night of 1999-09-04.  I discovered my machine
"gentle" had died a week before; it had apparently experienced a power
outage (or a spontaneous reboot -- the former is more likely,
especially considering the precarious nature of its power connection)
and failed to reboot.  It does this sometimes; it thinks it only has a
floppy disk, or fails to try to boot even from the floppy.

I felt rather like I had crashed a company car; people were trying to
use the machine while I was away, and their mail was bounced.  Other
people had their mail delayed.

I resolved to do something to improve its reliability.

I can't remember what I did on which days; here are the highlights.

I read the previous two weeks' email (a big job, but within my
capacity) and mowed the front lawn in the dark.  I also sat and vegged
for more than an hour -- King of the Hill, Simpsons, and Futurama were
on in sequence, and the combination was irresistible, even though I'd
seen most of the Futurama episode before.

I cooked a quick tuna-and-macaroni-and-peas-and-mayonnaise casserole
for dinner; the recipe was Marilyn's.  It tasted surprisingly good.

1999-09-06, Marilyn and I went out to Barnes & Noble (I bought the
Unicode standard, version 2.0) and to see "The Red Violin" -- quite a
delightful movie.

Marilyn was feeling a bit sick both days.

We discovered we needed 720K disks for her laptop.  These are hard to
come by these days.

I have roughly a week of notes on paper to transcribe and send to
kragen-journal, and a couple of days of notes on diskette, too.

I'm taking today off from work; the basement drain flooded last night,
so I've called Roto-Rooter, and I am reluctant to shower.  Also,
Marilyn and I have a marriage-counseling appointment this evening, and
I have various things I need to get taken care of at the motor vehicle
department and downtown this afternoon (license name change at last,
paycheck depositing, renewal of plates), so all in all, I have enough
to do today without going to work.

-- 
<kragen@pobox.com>       Kragen Sitaker     <http://www.pobox.com/~kragen/>
Tue Sep 07 1999
62 days until the Internet stock bubble bursts on Monday, 1999-11-08.
<URL:http://www.pobox.com/~kragen/bubble.html>