Why I run my own blog

Every now and then, especially when I’m facing my own computer problems, I think “why don’t I just give it up and get a Livejournal. And then today every Livejournal page is showing the same text:


Our data center (Internap) lost all its power, including redundant backup power, for some unknown reason. (unknown to me, at least) We’re currently dealing with bringing our 100+ servers back online. Not fun. We’re not happy about this. Sorry… :-/ More details later.

If there’s going to be a massive screwup making my blog unavailable, I want it to be *my* screwup, dammit.

Can somebody please explain to me…

…the appeal of J-Pop bands like Shonen Knife? Looked at objectively, it appears they sing the most cloying and inane pop lyrics known to man, and combine it with that English as a second language vibe and accents. Oh, and they’ve not very good playing thier instruments either. So what’s the appeal?

And I should point out, I’m not asking why other people listen to it, I’m asking why I keep finding myself compelled to listen to it?

I think I need a 4 hour Pogues marathon to get my edge back.

Followup on the hard drive problem two days ago

I booted with the Western Digital Diagnostics floppy that I keep handy, and when I did a quick scan it said it found a problem and asked me if I wanted it to fix it. I did. Then I did the full scan, and it didn’t find any problems. So I booted into Linux single user mode. Couldn’t figure out how to fsck the drives that way, so I booted with the rescue disk. It wouldn’t let me unmount the drives that way, so I booted back into single user mode so I could do a “shutdown -rF now”, which forced it to do a fsck when it booted again. It didn’t find any problems. So now I’m continuing to run my backup process every two hours, and keeping an eye on it. 36 hours later, still no more disk errors.