I’m not sure how I feel about this but I’m leaning towards scared.

Many many thanks for all the wonderful comments folks! Even if some dodgy blog-spammer has abused the trackback ping facility on here (I still haven’t figured out how to get it off) I am overjoyed to know that so many people still have some vague connection with my life, however tenuous. Thank you!
Some quick reactions:

• I don’t know what blogware I’m gonna use yet. Am open to suggestions!
• Yes Aknyra, Tiki is a piece of crud. As a Wiki it is adequate. As any of the other things it tries to be, I am profoundly unimpressed. Tiki will not be appearing on the new Trouble.
• Beloved E, take-away chocolate isn’t Max Brenner’s strongest point, but I will get you some anyway. 🙂

My crazy new job is just steaming along like a runaway train. There is so much to learn! The whole concept of learning my place in the organizational structure is so alien and new! The complex bureaucracy involved in doing anything staggers the mind, but not so much as the sheer stunning amount of thought that has clearly gone into it all. So, I read until my eyes bleed. One day I will have the privelege of being allowed to do stuff! This should not be taken as anny kind of negative comment on KAZ, BTW: Only a fool lets a novice sysadmin play with live systems straight away.

Finally, it has come to my attention that someone has been inflaming old wounds by sending mail to my cousin. I want to be very clear that it wasn’t E, and it wasn’t me. The last contact of any kind that I have made was my attempt to post a retort to a post on her blog which was brought to my attention and seemed to me to overstep the bounds of propriety which I have been trying to maintain. That blog comment was submitted around the 29th of March. Since that time neither E nor I have made any attempt to communicate with them, whatever you may have heard. I have written about my feelings here on my blog, but I have held to my policy of not naming names, and indeed, I have done my best to bar the aforementioned parties from even reading my blog!
Besides any of these things, in the final analysis these troubles have been essentially of my making. E has had absolutely no part in it. She has only suffered, and I will retaliate vigorously on her behalf towards anyone who tries to smear her at this point. You have been warned.
While I feel perversely pleased that someone feels so strongly that they feel compelled to defend E and me, I am telling you, whoever you are, please stop. Please just leave it alone. Enough unnecessary pain has come from all this. Please, no more!

Well, it looks like my cunning fixery of the new Trouble hardware didn’t actually fix anything. It is still buggered, perhaps even more so than I had thought. It is still the SATA controller being screwed, and it is definitely only ocurring under Linux.

The night before last, Erin and I watched my shiny new (still in the shrink-wrap) copy of Ralph Bakshi’s “animated” Lord of The Rings (1978). I hav concluded that I would have been best equipped to appreciate this movie when it first hit the Cinemas, and have steadily lost that ability since then, as I developed critical faculties like the ability to discern a plot. Wow that was bad!

Today I began my new, um, career at Kaz. So far, so strange. Working for a firm that big is deeply scary. It’s a distinctly disturbing feeling noticing that ones employer is so huge and powerful that they distort the sconomic world around them. “Kaz?”, you may say, “Kaz aren’t that big!”. “No,” say I, “Telstra are that big.” It’s just spooky.

Today is a most excellent day. Make of that what you will!

The new incarnation of Trouble looms menacingly close to completion. The grief I had with Ubuntu and AHCI was fixed by one B. Meyer who pointed out to me that most modern AHCI implementations are incomplete leading me to try turning AHCI off, and further to update my bios. All is now well, and I am once more very impressed with Ubuntu, both as a server platform and as a desktop OS.

Today I tried to take a copy of /home off the old server. I say “tried” because shortly after I plugged the USB sneakernet drive into Trouble 1.0, it crashed and refused to come back up, or indeed to do much of anything, including power up its graphics card or make startup beeps. Not Good. Further examination revealed that it had cooked either motherboard or CPU for no particular reason. This was solved with a new CPU and motherboard and CPU and three hours cursing, swearing, sweating and furiously wielding a screwdriver. It is now up and running, in that same very precarious, temporary sense in which a card-tower is ‘up’. It is hopefully making me a nice big tarball of the entirety of /home too…

Since I have the magnificent power of comments once again, I am also doing a bit of a casting-call: I need a new wiki, a new web-logging tool, and a new gallery app for the new Trouble. Does anyone care to make any recommendations? Please explain why your idea is better.

Thank you!

I am teetering on the verge of re-enabling comments on this page.

To the best of my knowledge the folks who were posting comments I objected to are now IP-blocked from this entire web-server. In any case, they should be aware that I can and will block them if they post here again: I can block your IP. If you use an anonymous proxy, I can block their IP addresses too. If you use dhcp release/renew to rapidly shuffle your home IP, I will indiscriminately block your ISP’s entire range.

Ultimately, if there is sufficient reason, I will turn comments back off again. I could make the whole thing login-only, but that would seem to me to defeat the purpose of having a page in the first place, and I know how many legitimate comments would never happen if there was that much extra effort involved.

On another note: It has been pointed out to me that calling my prospective new employers “alien overlords” might be seen as a tad rude. If you’re reading this, and you’re from Kaz, please understand that this is a joke. It is vaguely even a Simpsons quote (Kent Brockman says something just like this, repeatedly). If I meant anything by it, it was only to imply that Kaz is radically larger than any of my previous employers, and I am savouring the novel feeling of being a tiny little cog in such a huge machine. Please forgive my bemusement: I meant no disrespect.

As of today I have officially been offered a position at Kaz, a huge australian IT firm wholly owned by Telstra! Yay!

The job is more systems administration, and it sounds like the best of both worlds: a full-time role with all the security and packaging that come with it at such a firm, plus a consultancy element which means there will always be new systems and new technologies.

The location is better too: I’m in the Melbourne Central Tower, nine stories above a Max Brenner Chocolate store. Dooom!

That’s all. Just popping up to say I for one wish to welcome our new alien overlords etc. etc…

This morning, in a session with someone who purports to be able to help me navigate the inside of my head, I happened upon some interesting questions, such as:
Is it ever justified to refuse oneself forgiveness?
There are some things that once done, should not be forgiven. This seems to be a fairly common thread throughout the english-speaking world where the word ‘forgiveness’ has a more or less constant meaning. But, my therapist says, this belief system prevents healing. Maybe she is right. Perhaps in my case she is right, but what about the abstract case? Had Adolf Hitler lived to truly comprehend the magnitude of his crimes from the perspective of one or more of his victims, would he ever be able to forgive himself? Would it ever be appropriate for him to do so? Surely the opinions of his victims must have some weight in this? What if his ongoing failure to forgive himself made him so crazy that he went on to hurt more people? I doubt that any of the surviving victims derive any comfort from the fact that he committed suicide. If you’re a holocaust survivor, or you know one, and you’re not offended by the bluntness of my inquiry, let me know: What does it mean to you that Adolf offed himself? Is it a good thing or a bad thing in your opinion?

In completely unrelated Ubuntu, a name which many people would lately have heard me evangelising, is currently in my bad books. Having spent awfully close to $2000 on Trouble 2.0, I am now discovering that the absolute latest release of Ubuntu, released a day ago, does not understand the disk controller. The controller in question is an Intel ICH7R… about as generic and comonplace as you can get. Grrr!

In other news of crapness and lameness beyond excuse: E and I went shopping tonight. One of the things we sought was a cheap DVD player. We went initially to K-mart in Burwood; an old haunt of ours since it is open 24/7. They had two suitable DVD players on display, but, as is so often the case at the mart of K, they were both out of stock, and no, they would not sell us the display models, even at full price. Peeved, we moved on to Coles in Brandon Park. There we found and MTV brand DVD player, with more features than the basic model at K’mart, for $50. Gleefully, we purchased it and took it outside to the car… to discover that it made an ominous loose-components-rattling-noise. Taking it back inside, we were promptly given a replacement; the second of the three in stock. This we took home, unwrapped, and found that the remote control had a pair of thoroughly leaked, corroded batteries in it, and the battery chamber was lined with battery-goo. This also, we took back. The third and final DVD player in stock at Brandon Park is now sitting in my lounge-room, awaitng me having the nerve to attempt to install it. Doubtless it will explode…