In which I sing rfrench's praises

For quite a while I've wanted a stereo system hooked up in the computer room. All the components were lying around, I just hadn't gotten around to it.

This evening rfrench nagged me, goaded me, sat patiently with me, dealt with my frustration, and eventually did a good chunk of the work himself. He is a saint. (*cough* Okay, he acted like one tonight.) Perfectionism does NOT mix with the task of running speaker cable. I wanted EXACTLY THE RIGHT length, I wanted the BEST routing, I wanted ALL the stickiness of the old Scotch tape off the cable... it wasn't pretty. He put up with me.

Thanks. :)

Thanks!

Many thanks for all the responses about MP3 players and sites. I have a better picture of the various ways people manage this stuff. Not that I know exactly what I want to do yet. (I suspect the key here will be allowing myself to get a system that's "good enough", rather than trying for whatever is "optimal".)

Mad backup flurry

I'd been wondering whether something was wrong for the last couple of days, as my normally-solid ancient desktop machine crashed this weekend and then had trouble rebooting. But it seemed to be okay after the second reboot.

This evening several applications crashed at once, and one of them attempted to restart and griped about corrupt files. Cue ominous music.

Disk sick. Including, very likely, the swap area. Disk dying.

Of course I haven't backed up anything on this old behemoth. Of course it has, in fact, no access to any devices capable of writing (unless you count the printer, a relatively poor backup strategy). Of course my laptop's battery is completely dead. Of course no machine in this house can access files from any other machine, unless I am rfrench, which tonight I am not, as he is gone.

Well. I have a shell account and I know how to use FTP.

Couple hours later I have every shred of data I care about sucked down to CD-R through the laptop, including some crap I had lying around on my two ISP shell accounts, via the simple expedient of FTPing everything to Kentucky from one machine and back from Kentucky onto the other. I don't care if there was a faster way to do it: this worked. Phew. That bolus of data included taxes as far back as '96 and all the square dance choreo I've written in the last several years.

Now I just wait for this ol' machine to die, I expect. Too bad. It's been good to me. :-(