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. Ptacek" <tqbf@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 Ptacek at EnterAct, L.L.C., Chicago, IL [tqbf@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.

H O M E
1997 >> 20 March