dannyman.toldme.com

The Day the Hardware Died!

Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/1997/03/18/18-march-1997/

Yesterday is the day the hardware died. I’m going to make a personal holiday of it. Personal holidays off-hand;

Well, among all those hard-hitters, I dunno whether Hardware Failure Day can really catch on. Lemme tell ya what happened.

So like 2:45AM I drop by my room and check on my pine session running on at sasquatch. Two new messages. Oooh, I hit return to read them, and get a message from pine saying that a very serious disk error was afoot, the sort you talk to your administrator about. A disk error of “type 5” and that’s the last I hear.

Well, after some jostling about, dashing an email here and there, I hear from Tom;

Date: Mon, 17 Mar 1997 05:04:52 -0600 (CST)
From: “Thomas H. P—–” <t—-@enteract.com>
To: Dannyman <dannyman@enteract.com>
Subject: Re: *please* dannyland.org FRIED!

[…]

Your machine is making extremely weird loud grinding noises.

I checked all the patch cables and reset the box. Let me know if there’s anything else I can do.

—————-
Thomas P—— at EnterAct, L.L.C., Chicago, IL [t—@enteract.com]
—————-
“If you’re so special, why aren’t you dead?”

Yeah, that’s like not good. I’ll be coming home for Spring Break on Friday though. The next morning I checked my Amiga’s shell prompt …

PING sasquatch.dannyland.org (206.54.252.251): 56 data bytes
 
--- sasquatch.dannyland.org ping statistics ---
34749 packets transmitted, 0 packets received, 100% packet loss

Guess I’m in the market for a new hard drive?

But hard drives fail all the time. Hell, this would be my third dead hard disk. Anyways so me and Asao were making out a bit after dinner, and I’d left my glasses on her bed, and we took turns sitting on them. People kissing aren’t so attentive about what they might be sitting on. The arms were bent upwards, and I bent them back just fine. But, well … fine tuning the left arm it broke off. Ouch! Now I have a one-armed eyeglass.

Now Asao’s pretty conscientious about where my glasses keep themselves. She seemed to feel bad about being involved in their untimely destruction. That’s okay though, I’d been wanting to replace the lenses any way, they’re scratched. The frames are obviously quite aged too. This pair has lasted me many years, a good strong piece of workmanship. I’m truly impressed and hope to find an identical frame.

Rachel was wearing stretch pants today with a floral pattern. I thought that rather attractive. But anyway the bigger thing is turns out Rachel’s a budding optician, and offered to mend the “temple” temporarily. If this half-cocked set-up doesn’t work out, I may take her up on that.

I’m thinking, I’ve got some month’s-old backups of my home directory, but this “crash” has taken a lot out of me spiritually .. maybe it’s time to start things over … namely, my web page? We’ll see. I’m glad I’ll have Spring Break to give me free-time for restoring things! About all that’s new so far is I’ve added a recently-written story on line. When it was reviewed in class it was well-received for the convincing tone and excellent detail. The readers were then let down all the more, it would seem, by the somewhat farcical ending. You can judge yourself though.

I’ve got work to do, so that’s all for now.

Feedback Welcome

Dannyman gets the job!

Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/1997/03/20/dannyman-gets-the-job/

Young man, there’s no need to feel down
I said, young man, pick yourself off the ground
I said, young man, ’cause your at UIUC
There’s no need to be unhappy.

Young man, there’s a place you can go
I said, young man, when you’re short on your dough
You can work there, and I’m sure you will find
You’ll have a pretty damned cool time.

It’s fun to work for the N.C.S.A.
It’s fun to work for the N.C.S.A.
They have everything that the 31337 enjoy
You can work with our NetDev team.

…

I got the job, indeed. I start 2 April. All summer I can work full-time. Hate to disappoint Jessica but I guess I won’t be workin’ at EnterAct this summer! Maybe next summer, they’ll have real cool networks and such, and I’ll be super-qualified to monkey given my 31337 NCSA training!

Checked out an apartment yesterday. It was Stacey’s place … I dunno, I think I’ll keep looking, but for $375 for the summer, one can’t complain much. Considering though, that housing gets ridiculously cheap over the summer, I think I could do better. Morris said cheaper could be found even.

And that NCSA pays … $6 an hour .. no, not whole hell of a lot, but good money by my standards. Full-time for summer .. if that’s real, would add up to $6 * 40 * 4 = $960(?) per month! Ai! Not bad … assuming cheap housing and a non-luxuriant lifestyle, could probably cover tuition with that!

Poor Asao is working her arse off on Econ assignments. Word is she was up all last night and still working like crazy. She’s flying to Washington DC tomorrow for break so she’s like even Xeroxing stuff to work on over break in consideration of exams very nearly as soon as she gets back. Three, I think. We’ll be eating together as I work here ’til 7 anyway, and she’ll be swamped ’til then … we want to spend time together before going our separate ways for a while.

Dammit, I wanna get Dannyland back up so’s I can start writing neat SSI apps. You see the bottom of the page there? Yeah, I’m thinking to write some SSI programs to automatically generate a line that will link between the “previous” day and the next, so I won’t have to type that shit in manually all the time.

It’s about 5:11 right now, I’m mighty hungry … ’til 7? Well, we can go out and eat someplace nice, I can strap on the ol’ feed-bag maybe.

Today I started reading William Faulkner’s “The Sound and the Fury”. I needn’t start ’til after break, but might as well get cracking. For some reason I think I may enjoy this book, though I may be horribly wrong. Very difficult stream-of-consciousness. I don’t know, but we’ll see.

Ray is in the lab right now. He’s the guy I’m replacing over at NCSA. He seems jovial about the whole affair. I may have said how their selection was narrowed down to three people, well they went ahead, it seems, and hired two of us, the third being knocked out by the luck, or lack thereof, of the draw, or somesuch. I’m not sure. I don’t think I’d want to know too much what went in to my specific selection. Ray voiced concern that he was wondering where there’d be room for two of us. I ‘haint about to worry ‘though.

Feedback Welcome

Max Takes Ill

Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/1997/03/24/max-takes-ill/

Max is sick. Labored breathing, supposedly fluid in the lungs. Mom took him to an Emergency Veterinarian Sunday afternoon. After some medication and whatnot, he’s doing better, but he wheezes and is not very active. I think he’ll be okay though.

At first though, I was worried. What if he died, you know?

But now I think he’ll be okay. We’re taking him to the Veterinarian this afternoon for a followup exam.

Well, Dannyland is obviously back online! The hard drive was fried. Ouch! Well, bought a new one. Just well … didn’t have backups, so well … this web page is starting over then eh? Dave said he’d let me know later today what he could salvage from cache. I’d pretty much written off but, well …

Got a great deal on the hard drive. Well, not a great deal, but an excellent price. Something tells me there’s a difference. 3.2G for $309! I also bought a 16M SIMM. I saved $20 on the disk by not getting a box. Who needs a box? Well, I think I had forsaken manuals and the like as well, but who needs ’em?

The drive it is replacing is less than a year old. Time to contact Western Digital about some bad Caviar!

Dannyman’s tip of the day:
* 0 * * * is not as cool a crontab entry as 0 0 * * * … I noticed today that it ran my “daily” crontab sixty times between midnight and one. Ooops! Well, now that’s fixed!

It’s chilly here. My hands are cold, fingers really. No fun typing under such conditions, I think I may close for now.

Max seems to be doing better. We took him to the Vet for a follow-on exam. Pretty much it seems he over-exerted his aging heart. He seems better now too. He’ll be on Lasix and antibiotics a while, but he’ll be okay otherwise. He even ran some today, to and from the car.

Mom bought a new hard drive. Same kind I got. I drove the car down to Micro Center. I really like the place. She bought some software too. I’ll be installing Windows95 on a system for my first time when I get home!

Feedback Welcome

Oh What a Beautiful Day!

Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/1997/03/27/oh-what-a-beautiful-day/

It is such a beautiful day today one would prefer to do no work at all. So I’m reluctant to write here. It’s 6:14PM right now, I’m over at EnterAct working for the evening. I figured I’d write here as I haven’t in a few days.

Yesterday I got a postcard from Detroit! It was from Asao, from the airport. Today I got a letter from Washington DC. Yep, girlfriend again. She’s cool. Said she saw a movie and it made her think of me.

To be honest, I haven’t been thinking of her so much. There’s a bit more to occupy me here. I tried upgrading mom’s hard drive. Oh, it did not go very pretty. Oh well, next time I know better. Fuck Microsoft. But now she’s got Windows95. Caveat: if she wants any of her old data we have to swap hardware around and transfer it on to floppies.

Idea: I think we have that old ‘386 …. it could use a big-arse 504M hard disk!

I got a haircut today. They sort of styled it all funny and whatnot. It don’t matter so much to me since I just wanted shorter hair anyway, and it’s shorter now, so like, there is conclusion.

The A1200 returned yesterday. I don’t know quite why, maybe because it spins up slower, but the second hard drive doesn’t get recognized. Oh well. 700M on the internal should be more than enough. What I want though is my old data on the other partition. It contains what would be the Dannyland Graphics Archives had they not crashed and burned last week.

Asao should be back in Urbana now. In fact I know she is as I’ve received email from my lovely lady. She has much studying to do prior to a bunch of exams net week. Economics and Economics with a little bit of Business Managements and Economics to make things interesting. Poor dear. She’s got nearly four, well now three solid days to study though.

So what do I do with the page from here? Well, I want to write a friends section where friends will be able to edit what it says about them. Look good for an employer if nothing else. I think if I can also get a guest book system going, along the lines of “chat forum” about various topics I could toss out. Ahh, where to start? And where to go? When to end? How to go, where to end? Augh ’tis complicated!

Well, first I think I’ll make a customer error page for Dannyland. Ciao.

Feedback Welcome