Stats, Mars, a Lazy Sunday, and a Dead Server

So here it is, the first working day of the new year — which means running all the stats for December, Q4 2003, and for 2003. That pretty much means I spend the day watching progress bars crawl across my screen because my machine chokes if I try to run the stats program and my application development environment at the same time (nothing a gig of RAM wouldn't fix, but that's not going to happen on this machine).

So, while I wait there isn't much else to do than create more long, boring, prattling LJ entries like this one and to do things like read up on the Gusev Crater landing site for the Mars probe that landed successfully Saturday night. It's a shame the European probe that landed Christmas day failed, but this one should prove very interesting. In short, Gusev Crater was, for about 2 billion years, a lake. This is in contrast to the Viking landers which set down in dry, flat areas without much in the way of interesting geological and unlikely biological activity. In relative terms this is the difference between landing in the middle of the Sahara desert and the middle of the Amazon forest. If anywhere is likely to have evidence of past (or better yet, present) life on Mars, this is it.

Yesterday I did a whole lot of nothing, mostly wasting the day playing Sims Unleashed and Sim City 3000. As the last day of the year-end break I figured it was acceptable to spend the day being almost completely unproductive. Almost. I did do one productive thing: I decided on a number of images (all taken in 2002) that I'm going to paint or draw this year. I'll have post them all later since I don't have the list here with me.

And lastly, looks like the power went out at home again. It's already back on, but for some reason my server hasn't come back up. I've redirected the router to the backup so my websites are up, but I'm curious why the main server didn't come back on with the power. So, if you are browsing Gothic BC and find it even more brutally slow than usual, that's because at the moment it is running of a P-133 with 64 MB of RAM — how's that for an ancient piece of crap?