Progress on drywall

The drywall guys showed up on time (actually, 10 minutes early) and got right to work; they were happy with the cleanup we’d done and were able to put plastic over what was left exposed. When we got home, they’d removed the remains of the old intercom and had put drywall pieces in their stead, and had put compound over the visible seams in the ceilings. They claim they’ll be done on Thursday.

Progress on BlueLogs

I have my server set up and stable and I fixed the problems which were keeping statistics from being built (I deleted some sites by hand and didn’t get them out of the statistics part of the table; when the report builder tried to find out what was going on, it got confused by the lack of the site and gave up).

I’ve also updated the default home page and about page that gets created.

What I want to do now is to change the site defaults so that every site is public (anyone who’s a member of the supersite should be able to get to the discussion group and make comments unless the owner specifically locks it up); I’ve done this by changing manila.root, but I’m afraid it might get overwritten later and have asked on the Frontier DG.

I may go ahead and announce the server tomorrow anyway.

A Visit from Mike Nelson

No, not the guy on Mystery Science Theatre 3000; this Mike Nelson is my manager. He
was in town to talk to the Extreme Blue team through lunch; after that, we spent most of the afternoon together. This is very unusual — we rarely talk in person! It was rather refreshing, in fact.

Uh-Oh

When I turned on this machine tonight, the SCSI bootup did not go well; the first time around, it seemed like the disk didn’t want to stay “ready”, and the CD drives never responded to the card at all. A power cycle seems to have fixed the problem, at least for now, but I think I’m going to copy my critical data before powering down!

Specific Useless Information Sought

Do you know the program name for the OS/360 linking loader? Not the linkage editor — that was IEWL. But the loader which then ran your program immediately without creating a load module on disk. If you do remember the name of this program, drop me a note or put an entry in the discussion group. Thanks.

Actually, Emerson had it slightly wrong; this weekend, things were all over the place. We spent most of the weekend partially clearing the living room, office, and our bedroom in preparation for the arrival of the drywall people tomorrow. We decided not to move much of the furniture in the hope that they can put plastic over it (besides, we have nowhere to put our bed or the couches in the living room), but we still had plenty of stuff to move, donate to Goodwill, or discard. Diane did most of the heavy lifting in the bedroom and living room, while I concentrated on the office — I spent half of Saturday afternoon getting the last two months’ worth of financial records into Quicken so I could file the pile of papers which was already threatening to topple over at any moment.

In between the cleanup, there were other events — one of Jeffrey’s friends had his 10th birthday party Saturday afternoon, and one of our friends from our Havurah had his 50th birthday party Saturday night. Jeffrey had three different kinds of chocolate cake on Saturday (two birthday cakes and one which was “just dessert”), so he was happy.

More later….

It’s later

Our laser printer seems to have bitten the dust. It’s a Lexmark Optra R, and it refuses to feed paper automatically — I get an error 100% of the time. Most of the time, I get a “25 Incorrect Manual Feed” or a “28 Load Paper”, but once in a while, I can get far enough to get an actual “20 Paper Jam” or “22 Paper Jam”. In no case do I get printed paper out of the machine, unless I switch to manual feed, in which case it prints fine all the time.

This is the third strike against this printer; we had a similar feed problem a couple of years ago (right after the printer went out of warranty), which we had fixed for $400 by the nice Lexmark folks. Then last year, the fuser went out; by that time, Lexmark wanted $500 to fix it, but we found a local shop that did the repair for $200. I don’t think I’m interested in trying to get it fixed again (not when a new printer would probably cost less than getting this one serviced), but I just hate the idea of putting an almost-functional printer into the landfill (now that I think of it, that’s why I repaired it last year). *sigh*

[Update: A new paper tray fixed the problem.]

BlueLogs should go live tomorrow

With any luck, I’ll do a “soft launch” of the IBM intranet BlueLogs server tomorrow. For some reason, the “most read sites” and “most read sites yesterday” pages don’t seem to be being built (it probably has something to do with my attempts to remove test sites from my tables). If I can fix those problems, I can go live; if not, I’ll remove the report pages and go live anyway.

I guess I need to trace through mainResponder.background.everyNight and see what I messed up in removing dead sites from my tables. If there was an easy way to save what I’ve done on my main site and the two user sites that have been created and otherwise do a complete reinstall, I would; I have a feeling I’ve left some other dingleberries behind that’ll get me later.