…although, for the past 2 months I’ve had no access to a computer at home, besides my Mac laptop, which was at AppleCare for some of that time…. “The great mishap” happened on Friday, February 10th. A long story short, if your computer is freezing in linux at random intervals it’s probably a better idea to figure out why before you get that lovely ozone/burning silicon smell from melted components. To make matters more interesting, my file server went down about a week later. I managed to revive (or rebuild) my main computer a couple days ago, so I once again have rpath linux going. I have not recovered the file server yet, which will only turn on a few minutes before shutting itself off. As I don’t think I can really justify having a file/print server anymore however, I’m probably going to go out and purchase a huge hard drive and move everything unto that. Why didn’t I get everything working again sooner? Let’s just say that student teaching is probably the biggest time drain of all time… I had no clue what teachers went through before, grading papers, doing lesson plans, etc… Especially where I was working, where they have gone from teaching 5 classes to teaching 6. My basic schedule involved getting home at around 4:30 everyday, and then grading papers, working on lesson plans, updating worksheets, figuring out presentations on my ibook, (not to mention all the actual student teaching stuff), until 7:30-8:00 PM. Of course, student teaching didn’t start out that way – they start you out observing and then teaching preprepaired lessons and so on. Teaching in general is basically a 12 hour a day job, the best I can figure. Of course, everyone has been telling me that after your first year when you get everything figured out, it becomes an 8 hour a day job. I don’t see how that’s possible, but I’ll take their experience over my own limited experience. Anyway, if you wake up at 6:00 AM everyday to get to the school at 7:30 AM, and then work solid until 7:30 PM with only a 45 minute break to drive home, it’s not exactly on your mind to figure out how to repair a computer after that.
Which brings me to the good news, I’m through student teaching as of yesterday 4/7/06, and will officially recieve my degree next month. Which means, for the time being I’m taking some much needed time off to recoup, figure things out, and try to answer the non-spam, non-mailing list emails I’ve recieved over the past 2 months of computerlessness. Given the fact that my inbox currently has around 20,000+ emails in it, that might take some time. (I think 3/4 are spam however, but I can’t seem to get junk mail filtering working right with thunderbird…) If you did email me, and I did not respond, or were expecting an email from me and did not get it because you emailed me, or whatever, I’d highly recommend emailing me again, as the message could very well have gotten lost in the pile.
So, to summarize, I’m currently a solid 2 months behind in all things opensource, and given the pace at which things opensource evolve, that might was well be 2 years behind. I’ve got some serious catching up to do right now, as I don’t intend to leave the community even though I must admit I went on hiatus for a while there. Hopefully should be back on IRC again after moving some hard drives around and doing a reinstall to get current, my best guess would put this sometime on Tuesday. I’m taking the next several days off to go do something fun. I don’t know what yet, but I deserve it. This message was written with a repaired computer, with the old hard drive just plugged in and almost nothing is working right – I just wanted to leave a long note saying I was alive.
I owe a lot of people an apology for essentially dropping off the face of the Earth right now. Specifically, I think I’ve really slighted those at rpath. Dropping off the community for a bit, especially without contacting anyone to let them know what was going on, was very unkind especially given how great they have been. So, I apologize here, with the hope that everyone understands my brain has been mincemeat for a while. My instincts tell me that they probably need some help in packaging split X, split KDE, and the new docbook stuff which probably came out in the last 2 months. At least, that’s the major new stuff that seems to have gone on after I left. Maybe I can make some ammends by helping out. It’ll be interesting to see some real bugs after chasing down missing and extra semicolons in students’ code for the past 3 months. I’ll also be back on the lookout for bugs in the distribution, now that I’m installing it again.
I tried running a few conary updates to see if I could still work with a 2+ month old conary against whatever version is running on the server. It worked. Conary is definately ready to use now. I hadn’t seen much of anything major bugwise in January, and this last update “just worked”. (Not that I recommend using a 2+ month old conary, bug fixes and updates are good things…)
Best wishes to everyone, it’s good to be back.