journal for 2002-05-05
The Amazing Spiderman
Our Saturdays normally begin with bagels, window shopping, and ice cream. This weekend, we had planned some good additions: out to the movies, to the bike shop, and then sushi.
The movie was Spiderman. I’ve never been a fan of Spiderman—he’s just such a dork. Fortunately, despite a brief Bruce Wayne moment during the A Crimefighter Is Born scene, the movie was willing to concede that Peter Parker and Spiderman are dorks. The effects, which revolved mostly around Spidey’s superhuman acrobatics, were good. Anyway, how can you be down on a movie with Willem Defoe? (I ask this under the assumption that it was his evil twin who made an apperance in eXistenZ.)
So, despite the three little kids and their cell-phone-talking father in the row behind us, the movie was good. So was my ice cream: strawberry. I’m not a big fan of strawberry ice cream, but this was really good. I think it would make a killer shake; I’ll find out once the weather gets hotter.
work sucks
While I was having my ice cream, I got a page asking me to call work.
Sidenote: My current cell phone is a Nokia 8290, and is broken. It was given to me as a replacement for my previous cell phone, a Nokia 8290, which broke. The problem at work revolved around our Nokia Checkpoint firewall, which broke. I think my next phone will be a Motorola.
Since my cell was broken, I couldn’t call work immediately, and then I was in the theatre, where I was paged again (with my phone on vibrate, of course). when I got home, there were voicemail messages for me. In a nutshell, I was needed to help resuscitate the box. Sushi and the bike shop were off.
The resuscitation effort turned out to be mostly data entry, typing in rules from an old archive into software that had gone through a major revision since then. Needless to say, it took a long time and did not result in success. I can only hope that in the coming week we can come up with a way to keep this from happening again—both the outage and the disruption of my plans for sushi.
hardware
Our Windows box, plumcake, has continued its descent into total uselessness. It’s long had a problem with its NIC. The NIC is dual-homed, with both a reserved IP on our private network and a public IP. It used to be in the ugly habit of just failing on traffic on the private network. Now it fails on all traffic. Swapping the NIC makes it fail at POST.
So, I finally managed to set up XDM on humptydumpty, which was a minor coup, and Gloria is now able to get things done again. I think I’ll finally be replacing plumcake with a Shuttle SV24, dual-booted between an X client and a Windows box strictly for connecting to work. (If I get PPTP to work on humpty, I don’t even need that, and manxome can become entirely free of obsolete software.)