The proverbial caca hit the computer fan about ten days ago. The first thing to go was the home computer. After attempting to reboot after two power interruptions, the dang thing just seemed to hang on the last step in the startup procedure with this cursed spinning beach ball. At least Mac’s don’t have the PC’s “blue screen of death”.
After an attempt to use Disk First Aid from the system CD and some other tricks, I concluded that something was messed up within the directory of the hard drive. I needed Norton Utilities or Tech Tools Pro. Unfortunately, the local CompUSA did not have either in stock. Actually, they had Norton, but I needed the soon-to-be-released version 8.0 for Mac OS X. Unfortunately, that meant a significant delay. (For my family, a delay of one day is bad enough, but a week or longer! Is that a sign of our impatience in today’s modern society?) Fortunately, Norton 8.0 was released last Wednesday. I paid extra for FedEx and it arrived on Friday. It took three attempts using the Disk Doctor, but it is up and running now. I have backed everything up for the day when the hard drive decides to mess in its pants again.
A couple of days after the home computer fiasco, my daughter noticed on a computer at my wife’s work that cowpi.com was down and offline. It was not down for an hour, or a day, but a whole, bloomin’ week! I eventually discovered that it was not my web host, but rather the domain name service. They had put my domain name on hold! Why, I don’t know. I still had one month before it was due for renewal. After settling that problem, it took another 24 hours for my domain name to propagate around the world and appear on everyone’s DNS servers.
Well, after computer limbo for 10 or so days, everything is back up and running. I just wonder how many emails I lost when the domain name was down?
(Note, I have pre-dated one journal entry just for chronological purposes.)