(expletive deleted)
(expletive deleted)
(expletive deleted)

I have lost ALL the archives and setup and subscription information for my mailing lists. It wasn't backed up because it was stored, not under /etc (where I assumed all configuration would normally be stored) but under /var/lib/mailman (which is NOT a place one expects configurations or archives to be stored). Everything is gone. Every single post to gen_fic_crit from 2001 onwards. I checked the wayback machine, but they've only got a couple of indexes, no actual content. It's all GONE. Lost. Forever. Because I had to wipe the disk of my desktop as part of my fix-the-meltdown problem, and I blithely assumed that my backups had covered everything.

(expletive, expletive, expletive)
(EXPLETIVE!)

I give up. GenFicCrit has been a ruddy joke for the past several years anyway. Only a handful of people post there besides me, and there hasn't been a full-on discussion in years. Sure, I was happy enough to let it go on fulfilling its minimal function (a place to post my reviews), but now that the whole archive is trashed and the whole subscription list is gone, it is not worth the heartache of trying to rebuild it from scratch. Not. Worth. It.

Sh*t.

ETA: If any of my former subscribers wish to start their own fanfic review-and-discussion list, I would love to participate. I just don't have the heart to try to run one any more.

This entry was originally posted at http://kerravonsen.dreamwidth.org/595904.html.

Karmic Koala (Ubuntu Linux) has bad karma. At least with me. Spent hours downloading to upgrade to it, hours and hours. Finally got everything installed. Reboot. Aaaand... my display kept flashing on and off. And half my keystrokes were ignored. But because I'd cleaned my cache before upgrading (oops), in order to downgrade back to the previous release, guess what? Yep. Downloading for hours. (looks) Oh, the ETA has gone down to about an hour now. It was hovering around 2 hours for the past... four hours? Something like that. (sigh)

While I was waiting, I read fanfic. More HG/SS, silly me. One called "The Traveller", which had a number of good things going for it; decent prose, a twisty time-travel plot, some lovely angst, a happy-ever-after... but in the end, it felt contrived.
But it left me with a desire for Steampunk Harry Potter. With Mad Science, clockwork, polished brass, elegant Victorian-style clothing, a melding of magic and science, with, of course, Hermione Granger right in the middle of it.
Someone write it for me? Pleeeese?

Another story I wish someone would write (where does one issue challenges for HP folks to write, anyway?) is this: Hermione + Snape friendship, with Hermione/Ron 'ship, and Snape and Ron have to work together to save Hermione. Wouldn't that be fun?

Edited to add: (22:45) I have now broken my desktop. It will need to be wiped and reinstalled from scratch. Which I do not have time to do now. (sigh). I am glad I have backups of stuff.

This entry was originally posted at http://kerravonsen.dreamwidth.org/595609.html.

I mentioned before that my wireless router died in the recent power failure. So I investigated a replacement. Now, an exact replacement of the same model would have cost $100+, which seemed a bit silly, considering that I could get a more advanced one (Wireless N) for a similar price, or a cheaper one which was also on special for $59. So I ummed and ahhed, looked at my bank balance and decided it was unwise to get a Wireless N router when I didn't have any Wireless N capable machines, and went for the cheaper one, a D-Link DIR-300.

I have just now finished setting it up, with all the right port-forwarding and SSID and WPA2 security and static IPs and stuff.
( technical note )
Ahem. Anyway, I am dusty because when stuff lies undisturbed (like, behind the computer) it gets dusty.

We had a power failure this morning (high winds tend to do that around here). Ironically, the power came back just as I was crossing the road to the bus stop on the way to work. If it had been ten minutes earlier, I could have restarted my computer, but for whatever reason, these newfangled computers don't restart themselves when the power comes back on, they have to be turned on manually. So my computer, and hence my webserver and mailserver were down all day. That wasn't too bad, since I was expecting that. What I wasn't expecting was that when I got home and turned on said computer, the networking stayed down. And the networking stayed down because the router wouldn't turn on. And the router wouldn't turn on because... it's broken.
Looks like I'm going to have to get a new router. In the meantime, I've reconfigured the ADSL modem and my server to talk directly to each other, so hopefully the mail and website should be back up again. Do let me know if they aren't, please?