Shelter-in-Place Journal, Day 143

I was Toastmaster at the Silver Tongued Cats this morning; as expected, it was a lightly-attended meeting. Several of the attendees had to leave early, too; it seems that companies are starting to schedule meetings before 9 because people don’t need to commute. *sigh*

This afternoon, we voluntarily watched an hour-long commercial. It was from AmaWaterways and was a “Sip and Sail” event where they talked about their special river cruises for repeat offenders customers for next year; the pictures were very enticing. Some brought back good memories of places we’d been (whether on Ama or otherwise); some made us sad because they were places we had planned to go this year. They are operating a few cruises in Europe already, but only for Germans – they hope to start up more fully at the end of September, but I think that’s optimistic.

After that (perhaps influenced by the “Sip” part of the “Sip and Sail”), I upgraded our home server to Catalina. It went smoothly, and everything seemed to be working – but I happened to notice a TON of errors in the logs for the home automation program (Indigo), all related to the alarm system. When I installed my last-gasp Raspberry Pi on Sunday, I had to reconfigure the alarm interface, and it suggested I install it as a new keypad at address 19 (it probably would have worked fine if I’d just used the old definition at address 18). I had to tell the alarm plugin on Indigo to use the new address, but it didn’t see the new address and started throwing errors.

I couldn’t figure out how to redefine the address, but Indigo stores its data in plain-text XML files, so I stopped it, found all the places where it had an “18” as a keypad address, changed them to “19”, and looked on in horror as it complained about a corrupted database file.

I fired up Time Machine, found a backup of the file, and restored it; all was well. What was strange, though, was that I had no Time Machine backups earlier than 5pm tonight (about the time I was doing the upgrade to Catalina)! I don’t know if the upgrade destroyed the older backups or if the backups started when I did the upgrade, but I’m grateful that I had one to restore.