urgh .....

• I've been stressed-out all day to the extent that I was getting mild panic attacks when I went into the kitchen to try to cook supper, and was getting seriously cranky after supper.
• When I went to get myself a glass of milk in the hope milk and chocolate would help the hiccups, I managed to smash the toes of my left foot into something, I'm not sure what, possibly the corner of the refrigerator, hard enough that I almost dropped my full milk glass from the pain and couldn't hobble the remaining ten feet to my chair for several minutes.
• I took two Percocet to numb my screaming toes, and now the Percocet's making me unsteady and slightly nauseous.
• I'd go lie down, but although I'm physically tired, I'm still too stressed out to sleep.
• And my backup system is down because, after updating to the latest Bacula version this morning (which fixes several significant bugs), I find it seems to have a bug of its own which seems to prevent backup jobs from spanning tapes.  Needless to say, this isn't helping my state of mind, particularly since I have so few tapes that I cannot run a new set of full backups without deleting the existing full backups first.  So, right now, we have no backups.
• The floppy drive in babylon5 has been not working for some months now, so I went to swap in the known-working floppy crom what was once caravel but now will not install and stably run any OS we have.  When I pulled the cables from babylon5's floppy drive and plugged them into the one from caravel, it didn't work either.  So I plugged them back into babylon5's drive, and lo!  It worked again.  (Though xmmount insists that either the device or the mount point doesn't exist, but won't tell me which.  Mount and umount commands at the shell prompt work just fine, though.)
• And just to top it off, we received the correct adapter today to properly connect our new-old-salvaged Power Mac 7300 to its new-old-salvaged Apple Multiscan 1705 Display (thanks, koyote), only to find that said display has now failed and will not display any video at all.  (To add insult to injury, it did this just after I'd learned that with the aid of a product called XPostFacto, the Power Mac 7300 - with the Sonnet G3/300 card I just put in it a couple of days ago - should even run OSX.)

This better not be the way the year intends to continue.

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Update:  To continue the trend of hardware fucking with my head today, I went to check out the 1705 Display one more time before I gave up on it, and it's working now.  My theory: The VRAM was loose and got jiggled when the girls were kicking and shaking the desk it's on, which masked the fact that the DB15-DB15 cable Solex Micro sent me (and which I swapped in this morning when the Apple DB15-HD15 monitor adapter koyote sent me arrived) does not actually appear to be a working Mac video cable after all.  After I opened up the case and reseated everything, the Mac would output video to a 15" Mac monitor (which is on its last breath, and too fuzzy to be usable), but not to the 17".  Acting on a nasty suspicion looking at how thin the DB15-DB15 cable was, I swapped the fixed-resolution VGA adapter and a VGA video cable back in, and lo!  Video on the 17" monitor again.  There's nothing wrong with the monitor, it was the replacement CABLE that was no damn good.

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Update 2:  And now xmmount says, "Missing file or device?  What missing file or device?  There's nothing missing here.  I don't know anything about any missing file or device.  Would I lie to you?"

"MOOOOOOOOOOOM!!!!  The Universe is fucking with my head again.  Make it STOP, Mom!"

Macstuff requests . . .

Anyone have a spare, KNOWN GOOD Mac monitor cable, either DB15F-DB15F or DB15F-HD15F?  As noted in the previous post, I have the 17" monitor working using a VGA cable and a Mac-VGA adapter, but this method has the drawback that the adapter has to be set for a single fixed resolution using DIP switches, and takes away the ability of the Mac and its monitor to switch resolution dynamically.  You can't change resolution without reconfiguring the adapter and rebooting.

Also, anyone have any spare Mac VRAM that will work in a Power Mac 7300?

Mythological Forms quiz

You are Form 8,
Demon: The Destroyer.

"And The Demon took advantage of the chaos and seized civilization.  With grace and style, Demon slit The Goddess's belly and drowned the world in her blood.  The Goddess, The Demon, and the world were no more."

Some examples of the Demon Form are Set (Egyptian) and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (Christian).  The Demon is associated with the concept of destruction, the number 8, and the element of earth.  His sign is the full moon.

As a member of Form 8, you are a very strong willed individual.  You don't let others' opinions sway your own and you're usually not afraid to speak your mind.  However, some may see you as a bit overly passionate but it's just because you never back down from your values.  No matter what, you always do everything with style.  Demons are the best friends to have because they will back you up.

Which Mythological Form Are You?
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Happy backups

We now have a complete set of full backups again, and I'm considerably less stressed.  I didn't even lose that much hair.  Finding lurking showstopper bugs in a new release is a dirty job, but I guess someone's got to do it.

Said bug was fixed within about 12 hours, though.  Ain't open source great?

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In other news, Wen rocks.

She's just turned 18 months, and is sitting on the floor of the office with an onion, peeling the onion.  (No, I haven't the faintest idea why she wants the onion.)  There's a pile of onionskins accumulating on the floor beside her.  So I pull the wastebasket out from under my desk to where she can reach it, and without a word from anyone, she immediately picks up all her discarded onion skins and puts them into the wastebasket, then stands up and continues peeling her onion over the wastebasket.

I'm going to laugh if, after she gets done peeling the onion, she starts eating it raw.  She peels and eats raw garlic cloves....

Correction -- I misremembered.  It's Pirate who eats raw garlic.