WhimsyLand

For some reason, the power for my entire part of the town went down on Thursday.  What I didn't know was that one of my uninterruptible power supplies had tired batteries, so the servers went down, too.  This wreaked havoc with some of my websites, and it's taken me until today to:  replace the batteries in the UPS's, restore backups, buy another couple of terabytes of storage for current server redundant storage, reconstruct my domain server, get PHP and ASP and Perlscripts working again.  Whimsy Central now has close to 10 terabytes of storage for our various whimsical operations.  That's something like the text content of the Library of Congress times ten.  While I was at it, I also upgraded my fax machine (which is like the care and feeding of a dinosaur) to a fancy laser-based model, and replaced a few monitors with new flatscreen LCDs. 

Der called from Chicago and is taking a poetry workshop course at Columbia next semester, which should be interesting.  Claudia wrote to tell me that she's collaborated on an interesting new poetry work.  Frank has a new job where he will kick more ass and take more names than his last job.  Jan is working on her Paradox Book.  I'm making whole wheat spaghetti for dinner, with a home-made sauce including sautéed onions, garlic, and red peppers, canned diced tomatoes, artichoke hearts, capers, What'sThisHere Sauce, and red wine.  I received a new AQR today.  More about that tomorrow.

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Well, that was two days ago, and I still had another 48 hours of heartache to get through.  I had to replace and test the 16 sealed lead-acid batteries in each of the two 3000 VA UPSs, and one still isn't sure it's happy.  It was nice to have Ms. Emily around to bat at the plastic wrappers I peeled off of each battery unit, though.  Because I had to build a new domain server, all 20-odd machines here at Whimsy Central had to re-register, which caused them to lose all their settings (Outlook, desktop, you name it). PHP was not cooperating (PHP on Windows Server is a pain in the ass, in case you've ever tried to get it to find the php.ini and recognize all the extensions) and I still had 3 websites down, including one I host for a buddy of mine.  A lot of the directories needed to have their Windows security settings changed.  One of the UPS's still thinks it wants to be in bypass mode, but the new domain server seems to be doing OK.  The weirdest thing is that my VOIP phones all went kaflooey.  I ran an Ethernet sniffer on them and they're clearly trying to get an ARP response from Level-3, but it isn't happening.  I called Packet8, my VOIP PBX supplier, on Friday but it was late and I had to spend way too much time explaining that, yes, I know what DHCP is, and yes, our server is assigning IP addresses to the handsets, but no, I'm not getting dial-tone.  Now that I have sniffer results, I'll be able to brow-beat somebody in support to pay attention and figure out why I'm phoneless, except for my cell, which keeps running out of juice. 

Is everybody getting spam from Janis Goodwin, Jonah Martinez, Lessie Grimes, Deanne Childress, Claudine Floyd, Verna Cote and other interesting names with a subject line of "Read me!"?

I'm doing first reads again.  It is simply amazing how many people have graduate degrees in Creative Writing and still can't write poetry anyone wants to read. Or, perhaps what I don't want to read.   I'm sure you've heard this before.  Somewhere in my heart of hearts I understand that getting a B.A., M.A., and in some cases a PhD in poetry doesn't guarantee that you know how to write.  But, I am still amazed at the sheer persistence of these kind souls.  I was a professor for almost 8 years.  I understand how you grade someone in IT or computer science or even accounting.  How does grading happen in the arts?  If someone can parse Chaucer and write a term paper on Foucault, is that enough?  That seem quite reasonable for an English major, but isn't CW about actually producing something of merit?  Isn't a degree in Fine Arts about actually being able to do the deed, the same criteria one would use for a sculptor or a water-colorist?

Sheesh.  More tomorrow, really.