chuma.org

my IR transceiver only uses pins 1-5 on an RS-232 DB9. Good thing I bought 6 conductor cable.

Basement renovation is in full swing at our house. Strange, slightly dirty people have been invading our basement three times a week and forcing our cats to take refuge.

Seriously though, Sandy’s dad and his hired man / our friend Garth started working on our basement last week. So far the progress has been great, and our stack of saved Home Depot gift cards has been getting smaller.

So far…

• The washer, dryer, and laundry room sink have been moved closer to the furnace, water heater, and freezer. All these will be in the laundry room which won’t be finished on the inside. New outlets were put in, and the plumbing was moved, as well as rerouting some drainage, and extending the dryer vent pipe.
• Virtually all of the framing is done, save for the staircase. Which makes it start to look finished and gives me that “I have walls!” kind of feeling.
• Most of the new electrical work (new outlets and lights) has been roughed-in.
• I’ve been working on putting in a new phone jack and running audio/video and network/serial cables from the basement to the living room above. Our computers will be in the basement when this is done, so the outlets will connect my PC’s video/audio out to the TV, as well as a serial line to plugin my IR tranciever which I will use with an IR keyboard I picked up a while ago to control my computer from the living room. Muahaha! There’ll also be a network connection for the GameCube and possibly future living room hardware.

Putting up drywall will start this week I believe. Sandy and I are going to have the privilege of “mudding” and sealing up the drywall. Hooray for dust! Then will come the ceiling, painting (we picked a colour this weekend), and carpet. Then it will be DONE.

File system corruption, that is.

I boned my camera’s memory card this morning and lost 60 photos that I’d taken, including one of our house that I was going to e-mail to my sister and one really cool one of Lake Ontario that I took this morning on the train. I could only recover four of the older photos on it. Argh!

Which UI engineer at Microsoft thought that mapping Backspace to the ‘Back’ browser function in IE was a good idea? When you think you’re typing in a text field, but you’re not, and suddenly you’re not on the page you thing you are, that’s bad. Argh.

Bonus points for someone who can tell me how the fudge to disable this crap. For some apps at work I have to use IE, so Firefox is not a fix for this problem.

Holy crap, we were gone for a while. Now we’re back. Schweet.

So, you’re probably wondering, what the heck happened? Well here’s the short story:

chuma.org was hosted by my friend, Stan, because he was really nice back when I had no job and no webspace. Well, around the end of the year, the following things happened on top of the other:

• His server’s auxiliary power supply failed. It powered the RAID array.
• The RAID data was damaged and had to be rebuilt.
• One of the RAID drives failed and had to be replaced.
• His ISP went belly-up with approx. 72 hours notice that they were shutting off all of their services
• He broke his collar bone.

So that’s why I haven’t been able to get my data until today. Which I did. I just spent a few hours dumping my databases on a Sun box and re-importing them on my Linux box. So chuma.org is now on my box, so if it goes down again, you can directly blame me.