Grumpy Old Woman

The reason I’ve been gone so long is that I was just walking down the street, and suddenly, this really, really, REALLY bright light came HURTLING (that’s a damn fine word innit?) out of the night sky, until it hovered just above me.

I got sucked up into this HUGE alien space ship, did a 9 month tour of the solar system (and no, there was no probing of any sort!) until I picked up a distant vibration of trouble on earth. I whined and whined so much that the aliens couldn’t stand it, zoomed back to earth and spat me back out right on my street!

I came back to find that Australia had actually LOST a cricket match, George Bush still ran America, and the frock-wearing sex god Tone, has been a bit under the weather. Ugh!

To those of you who left comments and sent emails, thanks. I’ll try to stay off the street when aliens are about next time.

January 26 is Australia Day, and we look forward to the annual “eat lamb on Australia Day” commercial by Sam Kekovich.

Once again, he’s outdone himself with 3 glorious minutes of lamby madness.

Well, it’s back to work tomorrow.

I don’t know why I bother getting excited about having holidays, because no matter how long I take off, the time goes so quickly, it’s as though I just had a plain old weekend off.

Oh yes, I had grand schemes about all the things I was going to get done whilst I was off, but really the only two things accomplished were going down the coast to see my parents, and updating my linux box.

The things I WANTED to get done were:

• Formatting my windows box and reinstalling everything
• Thoroughly spring (well summer now) cleaning my apartment, and
• De-junkifying and throwing stuff out.

None of the above three were even considered.

What I did do was:

• Shop
• Listen to a shitload of audiobooks
• Watch movies
• Shop some more
• Listen to my new hifi (oh my god, it still sounds fab-u-lous)
• Eat cherries and mangoes (well it IS high-season for both!)
• Watch the Ashes Test Series - All of it - seriously!
• Did I mention shopping?

So, I’m back to the slave-market tomorrow and hoping like hell that my Lotto-luck comes in SOON.

Well the install of Fedora is complete and now we’re ironing out the issues. There would be no issues of course, if I weren’t wanting to run a web, mail or name server, but I am, and these require configuring. A configurer of these I’m not, so poor old Warren spent his weekend telnetted into my linux box tweaking this and installing that. At least my email is now up, but that’s only worthwhile if my name server were up, and it’s not yet! More work still to be done there.

Although I would like to say I am a command-line girl (or certainly would like to be a command line girl), I’ve been using the graphical interface and I must say, so far, I think it’s pretty great!

The email client is great, Firefox is standard for web-browsing, and it even has a windows-update-like feature called yum, which checks for package updates automatically and installs them behind the scenes. It also has an “add/remove software” feature which makes downloading and installing stuff easier than windows. Can you believe that! (Although you need to know what you’re installing of course).

It’s such a relief to have a nice, new, shiny installation of Linux running on a decent computer with decent hard-drive space let me tell you.

Now, another task I wanted to do before returning to work is install Vista on my Windows box. After some researching and listening to people say “Are you f@cking crazy? You want to install that DRM-ridden piece of sh@t!”, I’ve decided not to YET. I’m just going to format and reinstall XP for now. I like to reformat at least once per year as sort of a spring-clean. At least I’ll know that all my software and hardware will work with XP. I’ll let the dust settle on Vista (and let a few million other people struggle the bugs out of it) before I do.

It was epic. It was decisive. It was perfectly executed. It was by far, the BEST Test Cricket series I have ever watched.

I just can’t find the words to describe how riveted I have been since the beginning.

There’s lots of people who find Test cricket boring. But for me, it’s like watching a war. There’s strategy, there’s fighting for your country and there’s massacre. Well today, the no-holds-barred massacre of England was completed.

Today we also say goodbye to three legends, Shane Warne (the greatest bowler, EVER), Glenn McGrath (another bowling legend) and Justin Langer, batsman extraordinaire.

Guys, I’ve watched all three of you from the day you walked out as Australian Test players for the first time. It’s been an absolute pleasure.

Well the problem with my linux computer was the video card, which has been unceremoniously dispatched and replaced, and I spent the afternoon installing Fedora.

Yeah, yeah, I KNOW that in every group of 10 linux geeks, you’ll get 10 different recommendations for different flavours of linux to install, but I have been running Redhat ever since I installed for the first time, and Fedora is just a progression of that. I’ll stick to what I know!

Also, made a rash purchase today, a Slushie maker. I hadn’t had a frozen coke in my life up until about 3 months ago and OMG, they rock! Now, I can make my own!

Lastly, (again, yanks, you can tune out now), we’re heading for a win in the final Ashes cricket test. That’s heading for 5-0 in the series. Makes an Aussie girl proud.

It would almost be worth the cooking, cleaning and washing skid-marked undies to have a man (who likes fiddling with computer innards) in residence right now.

As those of you who know me would know, unscrewing the cover of my PC and fondling its innards is not my favourite passtime and today has been no exception.

In order to prepare my new linux box, I’ve had to open my old linux box and pilfer the hard drive (so we can get my website and stuff off it) and network card and my new windows box to pilfer my second slave hard drive (120 gigs of new primary hard drive goodness) and install all 3 items into the new.

The pilfering was a piece of cake. The installation however, has been hell.

Manouvering 2 hard drives into the hard drive chassis, with RAM sticks and video cards in the way was HELL. So HELL in fact, that I thought about pulling out the video card and RAM and attempted it, but I just could not get the video card out (short of using a pair of pliers, but that wouldn’t have been a good idea!)

So, I had to unscrew the whole hard drive chassis and drop it down to do it, after a few expletive-ridden attempts to force them in. I was extra careful when hooking the cables up (while the chassis was down), as I was thinking to myself, “When this is back in, there is NO WAY I want to be taking it all apart again because I f@cked up the cabling” and felt pretty smug and proud when after a lot of sweat (and more swearing), I got the last screw in.

The network card was easy.

Set it all back up and powered up.

Nothing on the screen and 2 short beeps, a bit of a space then another short beep from the computer.

I ring my computer God, Warren, who hmms for 2 whole seconds and says, “2 beeps? Sounds like RAM”. Seriously, this guy knows what any given number of damn beeps mean!

Both RAM and video card (which another set of beeps could signify) were right in the vortex of my scraping and prodding and pulling, so I could have toasted either.

Warren helpfully suggested that I take the RAM and video card out and re-seat them, just incase I loosened the connection, but thought the RAM was the issue. This is not good news, as the RAM is now conveniently located behind all the cabling mess for the hard drives. So, my friends, my answer to this is, I can live without my primary email until tomorrow, when, like childbirth, hopefully I can forget the pain of the day before.

First things first.

After 395 days of uptime, my Linux box died this morning. Of course the box was so old, it died a natural death. The death was electronic, so my old Redhat installation died while still on its feet. I have Fedora downloading as I write, and will be blowing the dust off the PC I replaced just over 12 months ago and will be doing a fresh install. Emailing me on my Ms-Geek address will not give you satisfaction over the next couple of days, as my Ms-Geek domain was hosted locally. You can get me at the same prefix at grumpyoldwoman.net, however. Good thing I took some of my hosting off-shore!
So, to sum up, my e-penis is now an e-dent!

Personally, I’m doing OK. Will be off work until the end of next week. Spent some time down the South Coast with my parents (and am just finishing the bootload of mum’s take-away home cooking, bless her) and have been hard at work shopping the post-christmas sales since I’ve been back.

Spent the rest of the time watching the cricket (tune out now US residents), crying into my Kleenex over Warnie’s retirement when not laughing at how soundly we are flogging the Poms. There’s nothing more satisfying than flogging the Poms. I have outlined Australia’s stance on sporting events against England in a previous post.

Well, that’s it for now, must ease myself back in.

Oh, and Bio, thanks for checking up to make sure I’m not dead and letting everyone know :)

I guess I owe you guys an apology (that’s if there’s anyone left reading this godforsaken blog) for my absence. Well the explanation is as simple as it is complicated. It’s hard to blog when you are going through a serious health issue, because your mind becomes consumed with wondering whether you’re going to live or die. Hard to take a light-hearted look on life and write about it in times like that I tell you.

Anyhow, I’m not completely out of the woods yet, but working on it and I’m hopeful.

Had to tell you that, as I reckon I’ve used up all the lame excuses there are.

So

Moving on.

I’ve mentioned about being a bit of a blog whore. Blog whoring is defined by me as someone who has such a long list of blogs in her RSS reader, that she can barely get through reading them daily.

Anyhow, one of the blogs I have subscribed to is one Erin O’Brien.

Now Erin is a writer and her blog is sometimes interesting, sometimes downright bizarre and I wasn’t sure whether I should put her on the “blogs I check daily” list over to the right there. The criteria for making my “blogs I check daily” list can be any of these:

* Selected blogs that link me (because clearly they have good taste), but they must meet some of the following criteria too
* Blogs that make me laugh
* Blogs with interesting or unusual content
* Blogs that are kept up to date (and if not, I think they are still worth reading if you haven’t come across them before)

Well today Erin posted a link to an article she wrote for the Cleveland Free Times. She is SO in my “blogs I read daily” list now.

You know I’ve been dying to reboot my Linux box, or turn it off for good (goddamn, it is so old I wonder if it is still a 486!) as I want to replace it with my old desktop, the PC I updated nearly a year ago .

But

I didn’t want to do it until today passed.

Why?

e-penis waving frantically.