Routed Out
The roaches were eating again last night. Almost literally. Oh I got the DVD hooked up OK. As Dr. Pournelle pointed out yesterday in his column, 90% of PC problems are cable related. And sure 'nuf. Even if this isn't a PC, fiddling with the fiber optic cable from the DVD to the receiver brought the Rolling Stones to life (they are dead aren't they? Or is it they just look that way sometimes? ;>).
And I even got the center channel and sub-woofer speakers hooked up OK (though its a rats nest of wires soon to get worse). Still to be done is the cassette and VCR. I would have finished those also except for the fact that in the middle of my befuddlement, I mean work, we got a call from one of our tenants saying the toilets were backing up and flooding the carpets. Sheesh. As if I'm actually going to do something about it. What do they think I am anyway? A PLUMBER (paging Dr. Jim, paging Dr. Jim). So I called Roto Rooter and they said someone would be there in about an hour.
Since the tenents were getting a little hysterical over a little sewer water in their living room, my wife and I ended up mopping up the mess which, as we found out later, was probably caused by the tenents trying to flush the city of Calcutta down the toilet. Eventually, the Roto Rooter man showed up and began to run his metal snake through one of the sewer line clean outs. Apparently, no joy. So he went around the house to the other clean out and ran it again from there. Again, apparently no joy because he could still see standing water in the pipes. But then before going into the house and ripping out the toilet to run the snake through there, he decided to test things to see it they would back up again. Thank goodness everything was working fine at that point and he figured he probably cleared the blockage the first time around. So, two hours and a lot of mucky water later he was on his way home. And so were we. Needless to say, I slept very well last night (and I'm sure those dreams about huge flying roaches will go away eventually).
Quick Notes
Email/Spam Harvesters trawl along the web trying to
find email addresses to add to their databases of hapless
people. Since the web is so huge, your site may not have been
hit, yet, by one of them. But at some point they will. When
that happens, you will know it because you, or anyone elses
address on your site will begin to get Spam (Gamble Online at
our Casino!). Take a look at this site
which gives some interesting information on how to try to
stop this. Especially if you are running an Apache server. Or
you can take a look at this site.
Today is the first day of the two day training on facilitating meetings so I do not know if I will be able to do a noon update. Check back if you have time, otherwise see you folks tomorrow!
Aloha