This blog is pretty stale. But considering the nature of this blog, I'd say that is a good thing. It has been difficult to keep up with things while building a house, moving, and working full time.

Not a whole lot has happened on the Computer Circus front. However, I have since found a new home for my web sites - I finally found one that allows hot linking so I can post my photos and link to them from my blog.

The computer I used to run my web server on I think has finally given up the ghost. I turned it one one day to copy all the files off of it (to put them on my new web host) and it failed to boot up! I tried a couple of times, and finally managed (by sheer luck) to get it to boot. Once it was up, I logged into root and copied all the files off of it.

I haven't turned it back on since.

I also managed - somehow - to lose a whole bunch of pictures that I took with my camera. I don't really know how it happened, and I don't even really remember the chain of events that led to the loss. All I can recall is that it involved a laptop that I was using from work, and I transferred images from that laptop to one of my desktop computers. But the images are nowhere to be found - and I have scanned ALL of my drives with Picasa as well as with some data recovery tools, to no avail.

It also didn't help that I copied 3GB of data to my laptop JUST before making this discovery. It was a comedy of errors, though no one was laughing.

I also have been struggling with this crappy network situation at my new home. There is no such thing as DSL out where I live, and I can't even get cable. It's the price I pay for living in a rural area. So, I have to suffer with this Verizon wireless card and an old wireless networking router that allows us to share the network connection on our LAN, yet none of our DELL laptops can connect to, wirelessly.

Without getting into it, suffice to say it is a royal pain in the ass. Especially when it goes kaput while I am working from home! My office is over 3 hours away, so it's not like I can just hop in the car and head to the office.

Anyway, I have plans to put together a file server - someplace where we can put all of our files - and a system to back them up regularly - so we can maybe create a little simplicity around here. I have too many computers, and too many vulnerable files spread around too many drives.

I bought a 1TB (terabyte) drive, and I want to buy another one to use as a mirror. Now I just need a computer case to put them in (all the ones I have seem inadequate, and I only have one or two computers that support SATA drives). Time is my biggest enemy. I think I need to just hire someone to come in and plan it out and maybe even set it up for me.

I'm sure that is a recipe for another entry in the Computer Circus Blog.

Until then, I just wanted to ping this blog to let you know I'm still around.

Anybody still out there?