*sigh* So Mr. Murphy - we meet again. It's possible that somebody noticed HiddenJester was down yesterday and figured I was doing the aforementioned upgrade. Well I was trying but ultimately it didn't happen. As near as I can tell the CD-ROM drive in the box running the web server is dying. I carefully backed up several gigs of data yesterday, checked it twice, and triumphantly stuck the first Fedora Core 2 CD in and rebooted. To be somewhat nonplussed when it rebooted off the hard drive. :-( In fact, I couldn't even read any of those 5 CD's on scribe (the machine in question). Mind you, I used these exact same discs to upgrade the router PC a couple of weeks ago - so they aren't coasters. Indeed 3 out of 4 PCs I tried can read them. But fine - I'll try burning another set The new disc 1 can be read, so I rebooted again - but no joy. Some more messing around, and I finally decide that it's really SLOW to read, and I think it times out during a boot process. I tried a CD-RW version (just mainly to try another brand of media), and it boots! Woot! Strange, but fine. Until it locked up later. I tried it twice more, and it locked up with read errors but in two different places. Of course this is July 4th, so I probably can't get a new drive anywhere. The good news is that I hadn't touched the HD yet, so I just rebooted scribe, and let it resume business as usual with the old Red Hat install. I'll probably get a DVD drive for it today and try to do the upgrade again next weekend.

Hiddenjester.com will be getting an OS upgrade over the holiday weekend (probably Sunday). Hopefully it will be brief, but we'll see how it goes. This will affect both the blog and my personal email address, as well as anybody using an email list routed through here (you know who you are!). Mail should be OK - hopefully your mail server queues longer than the outage will last. Anyway - don't be suprised if you visit over the weekend and it 404's. Check back later - we'll return with exciting new rants after that!

Today DJ iPod is on random play, merrily mashing together all 4600+ tracks with abandon. I was debugging something, when the current tune set off a chord of recognition. What was it playing? Tom's Lehrer's Send the Marines - a satrical piece about the Vietnam war. The verse in question?

When someone makes a move Of which we don't approve, Who is it that always intervenes? U.N. and O.A.S., They have their place, I guess, But first send the Marines!

(Skimmed from here) Some things just never change I guess . . . .

If you haven't read anything about Orrin Hatch and his "INDUCE" bill, read this. Between that and the fabulous "PIRATE" bill that passed the Senate on a voice vote with no debate, it pushed me over the edge. So I just donated to the EFF - yay me. But really now - we're falling behind in getting stupid, shortsighted, anti-technology laws OFF the books. There needs to be some way to tell another state "You can't elect that idiot anymore." :-) Some sort of thing were 2/3rds of the other states can say "No confidence - get this clown out of the federal government." That'd be cool. Tell you what - if the rest of the country agrees to do that to Congresspeople, I'll agree to let the rest of country veto California Governors!

What would happen if Chaosium and Sanrio had a baby corporation? Hello Cthulhu of course! It takes a bit to build up but I snickered several times while browsing the archive. Yesterday I bought The Activision Collection for GBA. Everyone's mileage will vary but for my money portable Stampede can't be beat. Damn bulls!