hard-drive blues

That's frustrating. Yesterday evening something wiped out a bunch of home directories on jtan (my unix service provider), and they don't know what happened yet. Maybe disk failure, maybe hackers, maybe something else. They're in the process of restroing everything from backups, but tapes take a long time to play. (I wonder if disk mirroring is even feasible -- not for everything, but just for the user files.) Currently it looks like they've restored to a full backup from a couple weeks ago but haven't run the incrementals yet. When they're done I'll have lost a couple mail messages that I saved yesterday but nothing major; it just looks like it's going to take a while to get there.

(The incoming mail is fine. In fact, I've been monitoring my mail by using emacs to read directly out of /var/mail. The only lost mail is stuff that I moved from my inbox to saved files yesterday. There was some of that, but not a lot.)

The sad thing is that they have a new machine coming in this week that they're going to replace the main user machine with, once they do an orderly clone and test and stuff. And it's not because this machine had become flaky. So if this is a disk problem, pity it didn't wait a few more weeks.

Oh well.

Just to clarify, though, I still think my provider is the best I've seen. I can't imagine that my previous provider would have been anywhere near as good at recovery or as dilligent about tracking down what happened so they could protect against it in the future. My impression after several years with them is that Telerama just didn't give a hoot about supporting shell users, but they weren't honest enough to say so.

(no subject)

On a brighter note, tomorrow is my turn for the dessert club at work. (I told you this is a cool place to work. :-) ) I think I'll make squash pies, as squash is in season. You probably think that's weird, but consider: pumpkin is a squash. And yellow squash makes way tastier pies than pumpkin, at least with the recipe I have. Of course, the rose water probably helps. (For those who have this book, it's in Cariadoc's Miscellany.)

misc

Ralph and Lori gave me a Solas CD for my birthday. (I wasn't expecting a birthday present! And they made me a cake last week, too.) I'm enjoying listening to it. (I had borrowed their copy once after hearing it at a party at their place, so we already knew I liked it. But it's been a while so I'd forgotten many of the details.)

Dani's been spending some of his period of unemployment exploring some games we have in more detail. I guess you've got to do something fun while waiting for HR people to write back. :-) He's found some reasonable-looking prospects, at least. Too bad it would be too weird for us to both work at MAYA Viz; we're looking for at least one QA person! But we talked about it and decided against.

Well, time to go deal with the squash pies. I need more rose water; I wonder where I can get some.