I changed hosts at the beginning of April, and it turned into an unmitigated disaster. The old host deleted my database before I had a chance to dump it, so I lost more than half my content. I wouldn’t even have that much if it wasn’t for Google’s cache. I’ll try to re-create it, but it may take some time. Also, partly because of massive ineptitude and partly because of thick-headed stupidity, it took more than two weeks to start receiving mail again, let alone putting the site back up.

I’ve got the site somewhat in place, but I am still working out bugs. Hopefully I’ll get that all sorted this weekend. If you see something wonky, let me know.

As is so often the case, I subscribed to the mutt-users list to fix a specific problem, and I have stayed on and asked questions and greatly improved and complicated the way that I use mutt. For the last four days I have heard not a peep from the list, and it was beginning to bug me. I am accustomed to reading or skimming the list every day, and so it is quite a disorienting experience. Finally, early this afternoon, I got my first message for a long time, and by the looks of the archiving groups, it is the first they have received as well. I hope the list comes back to full strength, because there are some great resources there.

I just went through a fairly major ordeal with my desktop. I was trying to recompile a kernel the Debian way. “The Debian way” is apparently catastrophic failure. Upon reboot I discovered that my Master Boot Record was so damaged that I was unable to boot to any kernel, and unable to reinstall without formatting the partition flat. Very upsetting. I made several attempts to fix the problem, but nothing worked. I also tried to reinstall onto my secondary hard drive, but ran into similar problems, and my aged motherboard, already flaky, started throwing Drive Errors on boot.

I finally got Debian reinstalled, but with the flaky motherboard I needed something else. What I found was a new motherboard, processor, RAM and case for the same money as a lesser processor. It was significantly faster than what I was used to, though I will still have to look further into CPU-detection, because dmesg is not reporting its full clock speed, but the BIOS, I think, is.

The upshot is that I didn’t use tasksel and I didn’t use dselect to install non-basic packages, so my system is pretty lean. I am always pleased to not have printing daemons installed when I don’t need them. Now of course I want to export my installed packages to a file to keep safe, so I can do one fat apt-get at the beginning of any installation.

There is always lots to do.