I have a disability

Life would be easier if that were true. But I am a little uninspired today. I spent the whole weekend the most odious part of my server upgrade - getting rid of the old server. It was fun setting up the new server and playing with new toys. Tearing apart the old servers and vulturing the parts to beef up Elaine computer and my workstation was just a pain in the ass. May I add at this juncture that Microsoft bites baboon ass? The ability to make mirrored volumes is crippled in Windows 2000 Profession (a.k.a NT5 Workstation) - I didn't realise this until after converting a drive I wanted to copy (thinking I would simply mirror the old drive and the new one and then break the mirror and carry on with the new drive) to a "dynamic" drive, then discovering that once a drive has been converted to a "dynamic drive" it can't be converted back to "basic" without deleting the partition and my slightly dated version of Partition Magic can't deal with "dynamic" partitions. [/me mumbles incoherently about crippleware]. Whatever. I got around it in the end, but not without some grumbling and cursing. In the end Elaine has the 40GB drive from the old server. I have the 80GB drive from the old backup server (because now my workstation is also operating as the backup server). The only really fun thing about all this harware-monkey crap (exactly the kind of stuff I have carefully steered my career away from over the last few years) was painting the old server black while I had it in pieces before building it back up as my "new" workstation.

I say "new" in quotes because, originally, this box was purchased as my workstation. It kicked ass when I first got it. At the time I ran my server software for my personal webs on it (long before Gothic BC as well as used it for a workstation. When I went into business for myself I started putting more load on the server and couldn't just restart the webserver or reboot the box whenever something I was working on hung up I acquired a PoS box to use as a dev/backup server. I was still running the development software on the same box as the live server but testing it on the PoS since if it hung it didn't matter. Eventually load on the server increased and, thanks to a dot.com.bomb some friends were unfortunately involved in I got a new, slightly used, "if you aren't going to pay me I'm taking this computer home and selling it" workstation and dedicated my old workstation to being the nothing but a server.

Of course it wasn't a server and I had to contend with the power supply dying and frying one of the hard-drives in the process. Fortunately everything was mirrored and a panic transplant from the dot.bomb workstation got the machine up again in short order at which point I went out and got a new powersupply and hard drive. That hard drive being the 40GB that Elaine now has.

This is the point where I started running into some money problems of my own as the dot.bomb caught up with me. My tape drive fried and I couldn't afford a new one so I started backing up critical files from the workstation and server onto the PoS backup server. Including the mirrored drives on the server that meant I had at least three copies of everything on the server and my workstation data lived in at least two places. I augmented this with monthly burns onto CD that I would archive.

Only problem was the backup server was a PoS with a relatively small drive and I quickly ran out of room to store what I needed to back up regularly. The dot.bomb had seriously caught up with me by this point and I was up to my eyeballs in debt. So the "server" had to chug along as I started taking on shit clients in desperate attempts to stay housed and fed. Pretty soon I was off-loading everything that didn't need to run in real-time on the PoS to lighten the load on the "server", and ending up having "mission critical" applications that were my bread and butter dependent on a machine that was literally someone else's garbage.

It was about this point I started my LJ, so all the gory details of the next few years are here to see. Basically one mess after the next (getting fired because of 9/11, $6/lb organic asparagus, the Goth Block fire, et al) meant asking too much from this old hardware for far too long.

Now, finally, the new server I meant to buy in 2001 is up and running and I'm pleased with it. The machine I bought as a workstation in 1998 is my workstation again &mdash it's still pretty pathetic but, painted black, with a great big hard drive and half a gig of RAM it manages to come in just a hair over "adequate". The big plus is now I have two spiffy, black machines doing what used to be done by three ugly beige ones. My desk looks much better.

But since I spent my weekend doing computer chores (which I originally planned for around this time in 2001), and after a whole weekend of annoying computer shit, I'm not enthused about work today.

On a fun note, though, one of my co-workers gave me one of those little stuffed bats that they sell at Ikea today. She didn't say as much but I know it is a "thank you" for letting her hide out down here after the merger announcement last week. She's been with the company for almost 30 years and the announcement was a big shock. She came down here to hide out and cry.

Of course that's another reason I wasn't terribly enthused about work today. There's still a lot of anxiety around here. So, having basically worked the weekend I didn't find myself quite recharged enough to go wading through the ankle-deep anxiety and tension that is flooding the office.

But there is positive news as well. Elaine and I, as of yesterday, have been living together for a year. It's been a great year. Never before have I been so comfortable with someone. It's never been so easy to be me and us. It's never compromise, it's cooperation. We're not competators, we're comrades. We inspire eachother. That's a wonderful thing. **squee**