Back to more-or-less normal...

The restoration of 'onegin' went well. Two items I did not take account of when backing up personal files were the .fetchmailrc file in the root directory, and my personal mail file in the /var/spool/mail subdirectory. The latter was probably over 10 MB in size, and there are probably some items in there that it's a shame to have lost, at least for convenient access (my procmail recipes include one instruction that writes all my mail to a .gz file, so if I really need to find an old e-mail, I can... but I won't enjoy it).

Setting up postfix took a little longer than expected, as I copied my saved configuration files on top of the ones installed by rpm, and the result tried to run programs that are apparently no longer part of the postfix suite. I had a bad moment or two trying to uninstall postfix, as I got warnings to the effect that other packages depended on it. I went ahead and supplied a '--nodeps' argument to the erase order, and then reinstalled postfix and copied only the main configuration file from my archive. Shortly thereafter, mail was restored.

Gotta run home and get a large pegboard so as to enclose the inboard side of the wall we've just drywalled on the side facing customers. I forgot my cell at home (again) and didn't configure 'onegin' to accept incoming telnet requests, which provide additional reasons to run by the house.

Cheers...

Charm, charm, charm...

Three times the charm, isn't that what they say?

Anyway, going home for the cell phone must've been some kind of ESP experience, because as soon as I put the thing on my belt, it started to ring. I think I may have some work lined up for the next couple of weeks, but have yet to receive any faxes. Too, I agreed to do a telecon tomorrow morning starting at 6 am my time, and I'm going to have to spend some time tonight boning up on some networking and laptop terminology.

Huntur is starting to crawl around for real, now. Drew left her in his living room to go put some water in her bottle, and by the time he was finished, she'd crawled out of their room into my office. The space has been largely cleared out (I need desperately to vacuum the center of the room), but maybe there'll be room for a playpen in the center of the office.

Otherwise, all seems to be normal, which is far from being "in order" (for some reason the German alles ist in ordnung - assuming that's even German - had been echoing in my head for a couple of days, which may signify that alles ist nicht in ordnung between the old ears, but I digress...).

* * *I've been rereading Mickey Spillane's My Gun Is Quick for the past couple of days, and it strikes me as one of Spillane's best Mike Hammer tales. The opening paragraph, besides being very long, is particularly eerie:

When you sit there comfortably folded up in a chair beside a fire, have you ever thought what goes on out there? Probably not. You pick up a book and read about things and stuff, getting a vicarious kick from people and events that never happened. You're doing it now, getting ready to fill in a normal life with the details of someone else's experiences. Fun, isn't it? You read about life on the outside thinking of how maybe you'd like it to happen to you, or at least how you'd like to watch it. Even the old Romans did it, spiced their life with action when they sat in the Coliseum and watched wild animals rip a bunch of humans apart, reveling in the sight of blood and terror. They screamed for joy and slapped each other on the back when murderous claws tore into the live flesh of slaves and cheered when the kill was made. Oh, it's great to watch, all right. Life through a keyhole. But day after day goes by and nothing like that ever happens to you so you think that it's all in books and not in reality at all and that's that. Still good reading, though. Tomorrow night you'll find another book, forgetting what was in the last and live some more in your imagination. But remember this: there are things happening out there. They go on every day and night making Roman holidays look like school picnics. They go on under your very nose and you never know about them. Oh yes, you can find them all right. All you have to do is look for them. But I wouldn't if I were you because you won't like what you'll find. Then again, I'm not you and looking for those things is my job. They aren't nice things to see because they show people up for what they are. There isn't a Coliseum any more, but the city is a bigger bowl, and it seats more people. The razor-sharp claws aren't those of wild animals but man's can be just as sharp and twice as viscious. You have to be quick, and you have to be able, or you become one of the devoured, and if you can kill first, no matter how and no matter who, you can live and return to the comfortable chair and the comfortable fire. But you have to be quick. And able. Or you'll be dead.

I don't think the prose has aged much, despite being over a half-century old.

Cheers...