To hear music tonight. Oh my.

I have become my grandfather, crawling around the back yard digging dandelions out of the cruel ground. It’s a hopeless cause, and they only interrupt the white and blue of the violets and the green leaves of plantains. Here and there, a blade a green grass amongst the slowly browning leaves of the scilla, which some have called invasive, but are my favorite early spring flower (probably because they are invasive: They look good, spread, and are hard to kill). But for the dandelions, scilla, moss, assorted weeds, and plantains, my back yard would be bleak and barren dirt.

I’ve taken a break and am inside listening to San Fermin on YouTube trying to decide if I want to buy a ticket for their show Tuesday night. My hero, Paul Krugman, mentined them on his Friday night music blog post. That Allen Tate is not hard on the eyes. There’s a video of their record, so it’s taking a while. By the time I’m back in the yard, I’m sure the dandelions will have recovered and reseeded themselves. I gotta go close the garage door at least, although this time o’ the year, I think the snow blowers are safe.

It’s earth day today. I’d be happier if the trees were not having sex in my nose.

I worked from home yesterday and took an amazing amount of antihistamines. The green building where I work is bad enough. I sort of sneezed my way through Monday. Besides I had a bunch of headbanging changes to make in a help file, mostly search and replace, that I could easily do from home, so I did.

Around 6:15 I left for the JOFcon meeting at the Doubletree. Traffic was terrible. And most wuz dumber than me, and worse drivers too. Some of you suburbanites really oughta take the bus!

One of my harddrives was filling up, so I bought a bigger one. Yesterday, a beautiful day in High Hay Fever Season, or spring as some of you call it, I decided to switch out one of the smaller drives for the big new one. Of course, I didn’t know which drive was the one I wanted to switch, so I started at the bottom and worked my way up the three cages with three drives each. This involves unplugging the cables from the back and taking both sides off the case. While I was doing it, I brought up the air compressor from the basement and blew off the cages and the fans and heat sinks in the case. I wrote down the order and serial numbers of the drives and took pictures of them (in case I can’t read my writing, dontchaknow). Of course, the drive I wanted to switch out was in the last cage, but I found it and performed the switch. One more of the power supply SATA connector decided it really didn’t want to hold on to the plastic sheath, which I had wondered what it was as I blew out the case and it drifted in the clouds of dust. The power supply has a gazillion cables, most of which are coiled in the bottom of the case because I don’t need them (it’s called too cheap to buy modular power supplies), so I just dug out one more Molex to SATA connector and plugged it in, only to notice a Molex to two SATA connector that I already had in the case.

By the time I was done, the dust in the room was thick, so I ran around with the vacuum cleaner, ran the air compressor back to the basement, and showered. By the time I was done, besides feeling like I’d been sitting on the floor for too long, the clouds had started to come in and the day to cool.

Today, Sunday, it’s cloudy and raining off and one. It started raining last night, and it looks like a cool week. The scilla are blooming, along with a few surviving crocus and the hyacinths. The scilla have taken over much of the back yard, and a few isolated bulbs in the front, which I wish they’d spread. I looked up to see if you can buy scilla seed, but could not find it. I did find that they’re considered invasive, which I considered surprising. We don’t have that many early spring flowers that I know of, and their season of glory is quite short.

Second brekkies today was spun duck. It has to spin early to turn into pho by tonight. With boiled watercress, which is quite cheap at the Asian stores, and taters. The watercress has a bitter taste, packed with nutrients, and makes a great spring veggie.

For brekkies. Roast duck, gulf shrimp from the Shrimp Truck, rice noodles, green onion, grated scotch bonnet pepper, NaCl. Picture’s still on my camera.

Would B&K like the Castles of Burgundy? It’s on sale today. (I think it fits into my “Too Many Parts” game list.)

I can see too many link icons! Originally, there wuz none. Now there’s too many.

I first heard this song from Ann Mayo Muir on And So Will We Yet

Past Caring
Henry Lawson

Well, up and down the sidling brown the great black crows are flyin’
And just below the spur I know another milker’s dyin’.
The crops have withered from the ground, the tank’s clay bed is glarin’
Yet from my heart no tear or sound for I have grown past carin’.

Through death and trouble, turn about, through hopeless desolation,
Through flood and fever, fire and drought, through slavery and starvation,
Through childbirth, sickness, hurt and blight, through loneliness and scarin,
From being left alone at night I have grown to be past carin’.

Our first child took in days like these a cruel week in dyin’,
All day upon her father’s knees or on my breast a-lyin’.
The tears we shed, the prayers we said were awful, wild, despairin’
I’ve pulled three through and buried two since then, and I am past carin’.

‘Twas ten years first, then came the worst, all for a barren clearin’,
I thought, I thought my heart would burst when first my man went shearin’.
He’s drovin’ in the great North West; I don’t know how he’s farin’,
And I, the girl who loved him best, have grown to be past carin’.

My eyes are dry, I cannot cry, I have no heart for breakin’,
Where it was in days gone by is empty dull and achin’.
My last boy ran away from me; I know my temper’s wearin’,
But now I only wish to be beyond all signs of carin’.
Past bothering, past carin’, past feeling and despairin’,
And now I only wish to be beyond all signs of carin’.

Martyn Wyndham-Read sings Past Carin’
music Steve Ashley / Phyl Lobl

Link

It started innocently enough. A dropped signal. I called the ISP. “We’re phasing out those boxes,” she said. “How will next Saturday, 4-8 pm work?”

“Fine,” I said, thinking “They work that late on a Saturday?”

The guy calls on Saturday, around 4:30. Sweet, I think. He arrives, and unpacks a new box, cleans the fiber, and hooks it up. No go. He checks with a gizmo and says “No light.” Now, I had been on the internet up until he arrived and switched out the box, so I found the whole claim difficult to believe. Several calls later, and after a check where the fiber enters the house, off he went to check a switch at some other location. Then he called to say it was locked — a reason for not having a Saturday appointment — and he would have to go to HQ to get keys. Eventually he came back, switched out the new box for a new old box, which also did not work, and left saying it would have to wait until MONDAY.

Well, I got a call at 8:00 am on Sunday morning from the ISP that they were sending out another tech “later in the day” if I would be around. “yes! Yes! YES!” I answered, and he called a few minutes later and arrived a bit after that. He put in a new box and ran something from his computer and talked on the phone to the HQ. No go. Off he went to the switch place, and called to say he’d found something and switched it out. As if by magic, I get a signal that I have Internetz and my computer logs on. All is good.

Well, I can only get one computer on, and that seems to come and go. I spend most of Sunday fighting with IP addresses and banging my head on the desk. I call the ISP and talk to tech-support who is mostly interested in the ethernet hub I have and its settings — it does have settings: two– on and off; and you can accomplish them two ways! Unplug the hub or flip the switch.

I have long and deep meaningful conversations with tech-support, mostly about the model and brand of the ethernet hub, and trying various combinations of cable and such. I become obsessed that it must be a DHCP server issue. I get answered with technobabble and asked to try another something. Everyone there assumes my ethernet hub is providing DHCP service (Surprise! It’s not!) and around and around we got talking cables and computers and stuff.

So I’m talking to tech-support and they’re calling me that the box is down, so I restart it. And they warn me that they’re going to switch the switch at the switchy place to gigabit, “So it all might go offline now and again, but by late Monday, it should all be good.”

So come Monday morning, and it’s basically no internetz since they started changing on Saturday afternoon (phones don’t count, do they?) and the connection light goes out, and I’m tired of banging my head on the desk, so I call them…

And we’re back to trying magical combinations of things to make sure that it’s the magical combination that fixes everything if we just try enough magical combinations and maybe a different computer or ethernet cable, and what was the brand and model of that ethernet switch again anyway?

And while I’m on hold to techsupport, the ISP calls to tell me they’ve switched the switchy switch and all should be well with the whirld and can I please check to see how fast the throttled down gigabit internetz iz, and so I hook my Asus BABY up directly to the new box. It connects, and I open up my morning links, and open speedtest.net, which for some reason opens very slowly, and measures a pretty pallid 15 mb down and about the same up until I shut down the extra dozen tabs and rerun the test again when it comes in at the expected 54 mb up and down.

At some point in the morning, I drag my wireless router down and interpose it between the box and my ethernet hub, and low and behold! Internetz! On more than one computer!

Of course, the wireless router was one of the magical combinations that was suggested, which I didn’t want to try because the router I use is up high in the room and I’d have to climb up to get it. Their wireless router took on the IP address of their old box after I reset it, so I didn’t have much faith in it.

A bit after I solved the DHCP issue, the called and told me to do what I’d already done.

When I go to my local big-box store without an 11% rebate, I spend a ton o’ money. When I go with an 11% rebate, I spend almost nothing?

This seems not like a strange new world, but more like an old world, paste in your resume, check, paste, edit, check, paste, edit, check…