Back in the saddle...
Sep. 24th, 2000 11:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexpgpThe plane landed around 8:30, over across town at IAH. I slept most of the way from Florida, or tried to. Sleeping while sitting up straight in an airline seat is not my most favorite mode of relaxation. I nodded off just after the plane was pushed back from the terminal, and came to again somewhere around 31,000 feet, as the stews were distributing breakfast.
Galina hired a small crew to paint the house, and they did a pretty good job. What might've turned out to be a three-weekend job, complete with every sort of complication, was taken care of basically in one afternoon. I napped through part of the procedure, which involved some industrial-strength paint sprayers and compressors.
The Linux server had been down for a couple of days; I suspect the unit got hit with a power outage that outlasted the UPS it's plugged into. Why it did not restore its nominal state was a point of concern for me, especially on the heels of having its predecessor system rooted. I found out on the way back from the airport that it had not been deliberately shut off. When I finally saw the unit, it turned out that the routines I wrote to bring the pppd daemon on and off line were flawed. Once online, the system would not automatically establish (or reestablish) a ppp connection. That also means that the machine had been connected to my ISP for about 3-4 days straight, before it went offline. I wonder if they noticed.
A review of the hotel bill shows a disturbing trend. Apparently, if you stay on line for more than 30 minutes to an 800 number, the hotel starts to charge 10 cents a minute starting with minute 31 and onward. Fortunately, the longest I went at any one time was 36 minutes, and I only exceeded the 30-minute limit about three times. What particularly amused me was the $8.50 charge for a two minute phone call I made home when I got there on Tuesday afternoon. Had I used my phone card, the call would have run less than 25 cents.
What I find disturbing about all this is that, for all they charge (about $160 a night), they seem to have no problem at all nickel and diming you for every little thing. What's next, a coin-operated soap dispenser in the bathroom? Anyway, I'm home now, and the hotel bill is not really my worry. I'm just going to be a bit more careful in the future when it comes to scoping out hotel accommodations.
I did a fairly good job of staying off the computer today once I got the Linux server back online. I noodled around a bit and caught up on e-mail while Galina went to talk to a client in the mid-afternoon, but once she got home, I pretty much stuck like glue to her side. We had a light dinner and watched L.A. Confidential. It's a pretty good movie, but the book is better. Hell, if you want the truth, the book is a completely different animal that shares only some superficial similarity to the movie. In his fiction, Ellroy writes of a completely pathological world gone mad, in its own peculiar way. Everyone in the book has a secret, or a secret desire, or a secret perversion, and none of it is pretty. That's Ellroy for you. The movie is actually a lot less 'dark' than the book.
Back to work tomorrow. I suppose I should show up refreshed and full of new ideas. (Actually, I have some of those, they're just not mature or mentionable at this point.) Paraphrasing Jerry Garcia, it's clear that something has to be done; it's pathetic that I'm the one to do it.
Cheers...
Galina hired a small crew to paint the house, and they did a pretty good job. What might've turned out to be a three-weekend job, complete with every sort of complication, was taken care of basically in one afternoon. I napped through part of the procedure, which involved some industrial-strength paint sprayers and compressors.
The Linux server had been down for a couple of days; I suspect the unit got hit with a power outage that outlasted the UPS it's plugged into. Why it did not restore its nominal state was a point of concern for me, especially on the heels of having its predecessor system rooted. I found out on the way back from the airport that it had not been deliberately shut off. When I finally saw the unit, it turned out that the routines I wrote to bring the pppd daemon on and off line were flawed. Once online, the system would not automatically establish (or reestablish) a ppp connection. That also means that the machine had been connected to my ISP for about 3-4 days straight, before it went offline. I wonder if they noticed.
A review of the hotel bill shows a disturbing trend. Apparently, if you stay on line for more than 30 minutes to an 800 number, the hotel starts to charge 10 cents a minute starting with minute 31 and onward. Fortunately, the longest I went at any one time was 36 minutes, and I only exceeded the 30-minute limit about three times. What particularly amused me was the $8.50 charge for a two minute phone call I made home when I got there on Tuesday afternoon. Had I used my phone card, the call would have run less than 25 cents.
What I find disturbing about all this is that, for all they charge (about $160 a night), they seem to have no problem at all nickel and diming you for every little thing. What's next, a coin-operated soap dispenser in the bathroom? Anyway, I'm home now, and the hotel bill is not really my worry. I'm just going to be a bit more careful in the future when it comes to scoping out hotel accommodations.
I did a fairly good job of staying off the computer today once I got the Linux server back online. I noodled around a bit and caught up on e-mail while Galina went to talk to a client in the mid-afternoon, but once she got home, I pretty much stuck like glue to her side. We had a light dinner and watched L.A. Confidential. It's a pretty good movie, but the book is better. Hell, if you want the truth, the book is a completely different animal that shares only some superficial similarity to the movie. In his fiction, Ellroy writes of a completely pathological world gone mad, in its own peculiar way. Everyone in the book has a secret, or a secret desire, or a secret perversion, and none of it is pretty. That's Ellroy for you. The movie is actually a lot less 'dark' than the book.
Back to work tomorrow. I suppose I should show up refreshed and full of new ideas. (Actually, I have some of those, they're just not mature or mentionable at this point.) Paraphrasing Jerry Garcia, it's clear that something has to be done; it's pathetic that I'm the one to do it.
Cheers...
