Ride that Train into the New Century!

by William Jackson on 2005-01-31

I hope no one tried to access this site last night. Because it was down, way down. For the same reasons, you may have noticed my erratic logging on and off various chat programs all last night and this morning.

Average users beware! There follows a semi-quasi-kinda-technical explanation of what happened! Nothing is really all that important!

To make a long story short, and at the same time use an ancient cliché (thus killing two birds with one stone), my computer got cleaned last night. Deep cleaned.

One of my databases got corrupted somehow, and it was causing the database server to crash every time I tried to access this particular database. For those inquiring minds in the audience, without a database server you canʼt leave comment on this site (and I canʼt post new entries, either). When this sort of thing happens I usually freak out in a mild-mannered way, and just start over. I couldnʼt figure out exactly what the problem was, and I couldnʼt fix it as it stood, so I backed up what information I could and wiped.

I think it was the sixth time Iʼve completely reinitialized my computer. Itʼs fun. I think of it like waking up and putting on the same clothes every day for three months, and then one morning stepping out of the shower and finding a stack of freshly laundered, neatly pressed clothes laid out on my bed. So fresh and so clean, clean. I use my computer so much it might as well be my clothes.

I needed to upgrade half of my applications anyway.

For the record, my computer is running Windows XP Professional, and my web server is Apache 2.0.52. The database server is MySQL 4.1.9. Iʼve made a few other changes as well. Iʼm not using Microsoft Outlook as my email client anymore; I switched to Mozilla Thunderbird. Iʼve been using Firefox instead of Internet Explorer for a while now, and get along rather comfortably.

I also decided to try ditching AOL Instant Messenger and MSN Messenger again, in favor of Trillian (which is a newer version and much nicer than last time I used it).