Got me replacement motherboard and my monitor broke.
Got my bags packed and my back went.
Not sure how 8 hour flight with no deep heat will go. I’ll be able to tell you in 26 hours’ time.
It’s the anticipation! Work’s no more stressful than usual, in fact possibly less so… There is organising still to do for the holibags but not a great deal… But I am absolutely flipping out!
As long as I don’t stuff up the organising part, I’ll be relaxing for the next three weeks though so it’ll be worth it!
[Sorry about the size of these images, wordpress claims to creat thumbnails for me but I have seen no evidence of this]
My PC has been freezing on me, mouse-pointer and everything. It started in the excruciatingly hot weather but continued after that intermittently.
I took the lid off and had a look, and 9 capacitors had popped their lids and oozed brown corrosive-looking goo.
I got all the caps off and got three replacements out of the junkpile. I soldered two of them on, but got stuck on the third. So I tried clamping the board to get at it at a better angle. I heard a soft ceramic crunching sound, so I undid the clamp… only I turned the handle the wrong way and tightened the clamp :-( So I now have a mobo with 2 replacement capacitors, 7 missing capacitors, and a crushed mystery surface-mount component. At that point I decided my computer needed an upgrade!
Ok, so we have “healthy looking hair”, we have “reduce the appearance of wrinkles”…
Now, from Garnier, comes: Garnier Nutritionist which is, wait for it, inspired by nutritionists and food scientists.
That even beat the “just two pounds a month can help save a child from…” wording on the NSPCC ad. I’ll maybe rant about that another time if you ask nicely…
On the way into work today traffic was dense but fast. I figured I didn’t have time and room to overtake the lorry before my exit so I pulled left with my indicator on. The van behind me passed me, then signalled left and started to squeeze into the non-existent space in front of me.
I let him in, and was just wishing that I had a turbo boost button to vault over his van and an oil slick button so that I would leave the A64 watching the van spin off and crash into a burning wreck in my mirrors (though, A-team style, the driver would get out of the car only slightly stunned), when he gave a little flash, right-left, on the indicators to say thanks.
And it was alright again.
Imagine if he had cut up K.A.R.R. like that and hadn’t said “thanks”. Things would have been very different.
I had to reboot the Mac last night for an update. As far as I recalled, I hadn’t yet figured out how to get postfix (mail server) to auto start on reboot, so I hung around waiting to start it.
As a quick check, once I had the Darwin prompt up I tried sending a mail from the Mac to my regular address. That arrived promptly and I could see the mail in the mail logs.
I realised of course that that is not the same as accepting mail from outside (My Mac performs email forwarding for a couple of domains) so I tried sending a mail from my PC to one of my forwarding addresses. That also arrived promptly. So I figured I was wrong, and that I had actually found a way to autostart postfix.
Today, my forwarding address didn’t work. I looked in the logs and saw:
Aug 7 22:42:12 Fifi postfix/master[290]: daemon started — version 2.1.5
Aug 7 22:42:13 Fifi postfix/pickup[291]: 56AB518C81E: uid=0 from=<root>
Aug 7 22:42:13 Fifi postfix/cleanup[292]: 56AB518C81E: message-id=<20060807214212.56AB518C81E@ns0.mydomain.com>
Aug 7 22:42:13 Fifi postfix/qmgr[294]: 56AB518C81E: from=<root @ns0.mydomain.com>, size=326, nrcpt=1 (queue active)
Aug 7 22:42:13 Fifi postfix/smtp[295]: 56AB518C81E: to=<steve @otherdomain.com>, relay=mailserver.otherdomain.com[xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx], delay=1, status=sent (250 Ok: queued as E4257168016)
Aug 7 22:42:13 Fifi postfix/qmgr[294]: 56AB518C81E: removed
Aug 7 22:42:56 Fifi postfix/smtpd[296]: connect from host.myisp.net[xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx]
Aug 7 22:42:57 Fifi postfix/smtpd[296]: 091D718C81F: client=host.myisp.net[xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx]
Aug 7 22:42:57 Fifi postfix/cleanup[299]: 091D718C81F: message-id=<44D7B3DF.9000606@myexterndomain.com>
Aug 7 22:42:57 Fifi postfix/qmgr[294]: 091D718C81F: from=<public @myexterndomain.com>, size=861, nrcpt=1 (queue active)
Aug 7 22:42:57 Fifi postfix/smtpd[296]: disconnect from host.myisp.net[xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx]
Aug 7 22:42:57 Fifi postfix/smtp[300]: 091D718C81F: to=<sweavo @myexterndomain.com>, orig_to=<steve @mydomain.com>, relay=myexterndomain.com[xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx], delay=1, status=sent (250 ok 1154986976 qp 95562)
Aug 7 22:42:57 Fifi postfix/qmgr[294]: 091D718C81F: removed
Aug 7 22:43:12 Fifi postfix/master[290]: master exit time has arrived
Aug 8 02:15:14 Fifi postfix/postqueue[879]: warning: Mail system is down — accessing queue directly
So it looks as though if your mail server is shut down and you send an email from a Mac, then for a minute after that your Mac is a fully functioning mailserver. In the out-of-the-box configuration this is not a problem but it could have implications for server setups and system admins.
Of course this is not Mac-specific, it applies to any postfix installation.
Worth sharing: tape people.
Last night was rather syncopated and Latin.
After work I went all the way next door to the White Rooms where Rob, Gareth (hooray! finally!), Lossie, Kim, Winston and I jammed some salsa rhythms from 6 to 8pm. I was worried Kim might get bored with only the clave to play, but she said the time flew by! Looks like she shares that obsessive quality that Rob Gareth and I have, and probably most percussionists do to.
After that a few of us popped to Bobolobo for “latin jazz night” to see what was going on and whether there happened to be a brass section there waiting to find a percussion section. What we found was instead piano, saxophone/flute, snare drum/hi hat, and bongos. Some girl apparently from the general public got on the bongos at one point and I noticed a few authentic sounds. Turned out she had been taught the basics by the drummer from Santana. Good credentials!
After their first rest break I chatted with Chris the pianist and got invited to play the Guiro on the next track (ooh that’s handy, I seem to have a guiro in my bag!) … I proceeded to whore it up for the rest of the night on guiro, bongos and cowbell. Lots of shaking of hands and hobbing of nobs went on - there I was with a bunch of dancers who were looking to become musicians, talking to a couple of musicians who wanted to learn about the dancing! If we keep this up, York will become a hotbed of Latin music and dance!
Was a bit dead today. I think it was the smokiness of the venue. The dancing crowd doesn’t really smoke.