every time i think i see light at the end of the tunnel, it turns out to be the headlight of an oncoming train…

the host provider moved my hosting services, and gave me a new IP address, the ramifications of which started on the 21st, and are still going on. literally. i tried to SEND email at 5:30 this morning, only to get an error message from my email client that the RECIPIENT “[email protected]” was rejected by the server… and this is on MY server… for some unknown reason, if i send from webmail, it doesn’t happen, but i despise webmail and will do anything to avoid it, because it’s too easy to spam and get away with it if you use the web for mail, rather than for web-related stuff. also, if i use IMAP (webmail), the mail is retained on a server over which i have no control, which means that anyone who can crack into the server potentially has access to my mail… and this is, for some unknown reason, not an issue for the technicians (if i can call them that) from the host service.

add to this nightmare, the fact that i’m still working on getting my new computer set up… it’s taken 3 days to figure out where my two USB drives are, move the data off of them, and reformat them, because, unbeknownst to me, they were formatted FAT32, which can’t see files that are more than 4GB, and i had been storing files on one of the disks that are >7GB, for quite some time. so, once i’d figured out how to mount them (because they had screwed up partition tables) i had to move all the data off of the disk (fortunately i have a new 1TB internal hard disk that was just aching to have ¾ of it taken up with old data), and reformat the drive EXT4… which means NO interaction with windoesn’t is possible — who cares about micro$lop anyway — but it will now see files that are as big as i want to make them…

AND, because of the fact that, apparently, i don’t know how to correctly backup my email files, i’m STILL having to battle with kmail/kontact/KDE-PIM to get things back in line — they still AREN’T, and — you guessed it — i’m having to use webmail to straighten things out, because Mail (on my ipad) gives me this weird error message, and kmail isn’t working…

FURTHERMORE, i don’t have things set up the way i want them on the new machine yet… i still have to figure out why gucharmap doesn’t have emoticons, even though they’re supposed to be part of the unicode standard at this point; now that i’ve got the disk reformatted to EXT4, i’ve got to figure out how to mount it at startup, so that it will be able to use the new backup software i installed; and, undoubtedly, there are a myriad of other, less important things that i have neglected to mention, simply because they haven’t happened yet, which are making my life unbelievably difficult, and leaving no end in sight. 😡

oy… 😠

all i had to do was mention the fact that i am getting a new computer, and it automatically triggered one of the worst battles of the computer that i have ever seen.

they moved my hosting accounts from us10.la.thewebhostserver.com, which is being retired, to a new server, mars-la.thewebhostserver.com. it had an IP address assigned to it that was ALREADY LISTED in four different spam-filtering services (that i know about), so they gave me a new IP address, which doesn’t have a rDNS record, and also doesn’t have a DNS PTR record (which is, apparently, different from an rDNS record), which means that i can only send email to about a third of the people to whom i need to send email, and the rest of them generate bounce notices.

this has been going on ever since the 21st, which is the last time i posted here, and, while it has definitely been on its way to getting fixed, they have been taking their bloody time about it, and i have been getting more and more convinced that, once again, i should probably think about finding a new host provider. 😡

and, while i have it sitting on my desk next to me, the new computer still is not hooked up or working yet, because i want to be sure that everything is working the way it is supposed to work BEFORE i do something that i know to be destructive to my system.

the battle is joined

i’m getting a new computer. the primary hard disk on the current computer says this:

salamandir@Gingko:~$ sudo smartctl -l selftest /dev/sda
smartctl 6.2 2013-07-26 r3841 [i686-linux-3.13.0-63-generic] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-13, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org

=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART Self-test log structure revision number 1
Num Test_Description Status Remaining LifeTime(hours) LBA_of_first_error
# 1 Short offline Completed: read failure 90% 29056 323066047
# 2 Short offline Completed: read failure 90% 29025 323066047

salamandir@Gingko:~$ sudo smartctl -l selftest /dev/sdb
smartctl 6.2 2013-07-26 r3841 [i686-linux-3.13.0-63-generic] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-13, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org

=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART Self-test log structure revision number 1
Num Test_Description Status Remaining LifeTime(hours) LBA_of_first_error
# 1 Short offline Completed without error 00% 38197 -

which means, basically, that the primary hard disk – /dev/sda – has a read failure, and the secondary hard disk is okay… but i just copied all of the data off the secondary hard disk today anyway… and they’re 180gb and 200gb respectively, which means i can replace both of them with a brand new 1TB disk for about the same price that i could search out two used drives of the same size, and for a little bit more, i can replace the whole machine, with 4 times the RAM.

which sounds like a very good idea to me. so, i’m doing that. i’ll probably be offline for a day or so, within the next few days, but i don’t anticipate a major ordeal.

bellingharm

bellingham, and a majority of the remaining people i care about there, have changed so dramatically during the past few years that i no longer want to live there.

i’m not even sure how much i’m going to want to go back to visit, after a few more attempts…

seriously.

people are lying to each other, plotting behind the backs of people who used to be friends, peoples’ lives are deteriorating and the people who care are being rebuffed… households that have been solid for 35 years are breaking up… all the good people are dying or have already left, and the people who remain are getting drunk, messing up their friends’ lives, and not caring…

i’m really glad that moe rescued me from all that, and i’m hoping that the remaining friends i have who currently live there, get out and move to some place where people actually care about each other. 😒

stuff & nonsense

i brought home the glass bong that i made in the previous post, and now have two glasses in the annealer, waiting for me to pick them up. 8)

the fremont phil has a gig on friday, which is tomorrow. i’m probably going up to b’ham to visit with kenyth on saturday. maybe coming back saturday, maybe sunday… haven’t decided yet.

saturday is also frank zappa day, and international talk-like-a-pirate day. a week from saturday is festa italiana for the BSSB. the thursday after that (which is the first of october), snake suspenderz has a gig at the chateau retirement center. maybe they’ll remember to pay us this time.

there’s a video that goes here, but it’s taking forever to upload, so i’ll put it in later.

new news

for the past few weeks i’ve been learning to blow glass.

it takes time to anneal the glass, so i can’t take home pieces right away. this week i got the piece that i worked on last week. it’s a little wobbly, because it’s my first actual piece, but it turned out quite well…

150904 hand blown glass bong
150904 hand blown glass bong

next time i have a lesson (in 2 weeks) i will get to take home my second piece, which is orders of magnitude better than my first piece… 😎