So… A bit quiet around here, yes? I took a couple of use-it-or-lose-it days and rested. Did some work around the house and all. Not as much as I really ought to have, but the lawn is mowed and I’ve made a dent in the horde (that’s my wife’s term for dirty dishes).
Thursday night was full of storm and rain, lightning, wind, and distant tornado sirens. We spent some quality time around midnight listening to Emergency Alert System updates on WEMU until the power went out. I think I dozed off around 1am.
The lack of power made it kind of tough to do some of the stuff I’d planned for Friday, so I did a bit of heavy lifting and yard work, setting up a stone path in the back yard using some of the big flat rocks from my parents’ camp on the shore of Lake Superior. I’ve had them stacked on the end of the driveway for a while, and it’s good to finally have them in position. They’ll need a little bit more jockeying and some digging to get them flat and embedded, but that’s minor stuff.
Power came on around 2pm on Friday, so that night I decided to set up a web server hosted on an old Powerbook G3. Having it up for in-house use was easy, but for external access I needed to set up things so that web calls to the router were forwarded to the server. It was already set up with the standard Apache install and all, but I wanted to put PHPWiki on it, which involved setting up MySQL and tweaking the httpd.conf file and all sorts of fun file copy and transfer stuff. About four or five hours worth of acronyms that I won’t bore you with, but they were fun at the time.
Saturday I got an e-mail from one of my friends who pointed out a minor complication that I hadn’t forseen… When PHP was creating dynamic pages it was giving them IP addresses on the internal network, which were absolute gibberish to anyone connecting through the mapped port. Probably an easy thing to fix, but the weekend lightning storms made the whole thing academic. The power went out briefly sometime in the early afternoon and something in the way it flickered or spiked killed off the old Powerbook. Less than twelve hours of uptime after I spent all that effort… I’m going to have to see about getting some sort of less fragile replacment set up.
Saturday evening we headed out and brought a small vat of chicken chili to my father-in-law. We tried calling him to warn that we were en-route, but the phone was busy. We arrived with hot food, fresh bread and a movie to watch, only to discover that he’d already eaten dinner and that the power was out… We still had a good time hanging out, and the power came on later, so we were able to watch the DVD and enjoy a freshly baked desert.
After we got home I fell into a book. It’s a problem I have sometimes… I get reading and I lose track of time and just kind of tune out the outside noises. I used to get in trouble for it when I was a kid and I’d miss calls for dinner. I’d just meant to read for an hour or two to rest my brain before hitting bed. Instead I found someplace comfy to sit, opened the book and didn’t look away until nearly 8AM on Sunday.
As you can probably imagine, Sunday wasn’t exactly a day of great productivity, although we did get to hang out with Dirge and Shar that evening… And we got to see some of the storm devastation while out and about. Quite impressive stuff. I didn’t have my good camera with me, so I just took some shots with the little camera in the Palm Zire that my wife has dubbed ‘The Deedelt.’ I’ll post them later…
Monday was prep work for the Memorial Day northward jaunt. I got the sleeping bags laundered and ready to go and did some other stuff… We’re planning on bringing the cats up North with us this time, so there’s going to be some luggage restrictions and reorganizations that we haven’t had to deal with before.
That’s about it actually…