Phone
My old phone had an unfortunate accident and its antenna snapped off. It doesn't work very well without its antenna, so I'm looking for a new phone. Usually, when I'm in need of new hardware, I turn to Ian's House of Secondhand Electronics. Ian is almost always up-to-date with the latest gadgets, and hence often has older technology that he's no longer using. Since Ian had recently showed me his new super-phone, I figured there'd be a good chance he had another, unused phone lying around somewhere. Sure enough, he did.

My old phone has the size and functionality approaching that of a small housebrick. It can store numbers on the SIM card, dial them, turn itself off without no good reason, and snap its antenna off should you sit upon it. I was hoping for a new phone that had about the same set of features or better, so Ian's "old" phone was a bit of a surprise.

The phone has a Java Virtual Machine, mp3 player, WAP, an assortment of games, voice dialing, dictaphone, infra-red port, and a variety of other things that I'm sure are completely unnecessary on a mobile phone. It uses multi-media memory cards (MMCs), exactly the same things that my Palm uses. In fact, it talks to the Palm rather well. I've almost reached the stage where I can get my Palm to dial out through the phone, and establish an ssh connection with a remote machine.

I've only found two problems with the phone. It doesn't appreciate my Palm trying to send its entire vcard database at once (it only accepts the first entry), and one of the most useful buttons is broken. The broken button can be ignored 90% of the time, and is a complete and utter pain in the rear for the remaining 10%. On the other hand, Ian is selling the phone at a very reasonable price, so I'll have to see what I think over the coming week.

Work
I so want to be back on holidays.

Frontier: First Enounters
Wow, it really does work under Linux. In fact, it works really really well under Linux. I'm very impressed.

Chickens
One of our chickens is still broken. For reasons unknown, she's laying eggs with very thin shells. This is very bad, since they break in the nest and foul it. This messes up the other eggs, bedding materials, and any chickens that are inclined to go broody. The chooks have plenty of grit and calcium sources available.

Unfortunately, I have no idea which chicken is having difficulties. Separating a few of the hens around laying time should reveal the culprit.

Holidays
I had a delightful break over the last couple of weeks. Shame it didn't last as long as I would have liked. However, major highlights include:

• Spending a few days up on future-parent-in-laws farm at Clunes.
• Playing lots of board-games with friends (something I rarely have time to do).
• Role-playing with friends (something I haven't had time to do for a long time).
• Purchase of a new bed-frame and pocket-spring, queen-sized mattress.
• Order of some rather kickass 16ms refresh 17" LCD monitors.
• A friend's wedding.
• Not taking support calls.

Games - Transport Tycoon Deluxe
I've always been a big fan of the game Transport Tycoon Deluxe (TTD), which is an excellent and engrossing game. For many years, there's been talk of many things that it would be "nice to have" in the game (bugfixes and features), and some lamenting that it's no longer actively maintained.

Well, imagine my surprise and great joy when I discovered The Transport Tycoon Deluxe Patch. Bugfixes, new features, new vehicles, improved signals, helicopters that don't obsolete, Win2K/XP compatability -- a whole bunch of things that the TTD community was talking about a few years ago. All this written in assembler, under an open source license, and without the original TTD source code. From my extensive testing, it's also very stable. Wow!

Games - Frontier: Elite II

On the topic of games that Chris Sawyer (creator of TTD) has had a hand in, both Frontier: Elite II, and Frontier: First Encounters have been released as shareware by the copyright holders. There's also talk of providing access to the source code so that the games can continue to be extended and updated.

But, it gets even better. Normally, Frontier: First Encounters completely refuses to run under anything other than "DOS Mode". However, there now also exists a Windows Port (JJFFE) of the game, courtesy of John Jordan. There's even instructions on getting the game running under Linux!

Christmas Carol (an almost true story)
On the Nth day of Christmas, my server gave to me:

a bad block on hda3.
2 toasted drives;
3 boxes down;
4 volume backups;
RAID-5 failure;
6 friends a-leaving;
7 megs of spam;
8 failed recovers;
9 hours restoring;
10 calls from jarich;
11 clients off-line;
12 hours downtime;

Notes
Yup, on the morning of Boxing Day, two of the drives in my RAID-5 developed bad-blocks within two hours of each other, resulting in complete failure of my main storage device. After some failed attempts at resurrecting the array, I was forced to re-partition away the bad areas, reconstruct the RAID, re-format, and restore from tape. Luckily my last backup was made a mere four hours before the failure, so the entire process occured with no data loss. The drive that holds mail was unaffected, so I didn't lose any of the tremendous amount of spam that I seem to receive each day.

I'm investigating return of the limping drives to the manufacturer for replacement.

Remember:

• Make backups frequently.
• Test your backups frequently.
• Keep off-site backups.
• Murphy's law applies to RAIDs, too.

Work
Okay, this is getting ridiculous. Months ago I briefly meet a sales rep from something like the world's second largest telecommunications corporation. He takes great delight in telling me how fantastic his network is, how there are hundreds of engineers all working on it making sure that it's the best in the world. And when he has a problem with a Linux proxy setup, who does he call...?

Election
Labor won the state election. Wow. What a surprise there. Never would have predicted that.

Cricket
Australia won the cricket. Wow. What a surprise there. Never would have predicted that.

Happy Clients
(on the telephone)

Client: ...and we had to disconnect and move all the equipment because of flash flooding last week. Since that time we haven't been able to print.

Me: Okay. I can try to connect in to the machine and see if there's anything obviously amiss. You've got a login for me? Great. (scribbles notes and invokes ssh) Okay, give me a moment.

pause

Me: It looks like the printer is alive and on the network, but the print spooling process didn't start up cleanly. I'll just nudge it along. There we go. Your printer sho...

Client: It's printing! It's printing! (Cheers in background.)

Me: Oh good. I'm glad to hear that fixed it.

Client: It stopped.

Me: Looks like a paper jam to me.

Client: You're right. It is a paper-jam! How did you know that? Are you in the matrix?

Me: That's right. There is no spoon. Oh good, you've cleared the jam. Anything else I can help with?

Client: Nothing else urgent. That was fantastic. I never dreamed you'd be able to fix our printer over the phone. I'll tell you now, the smiles here are worth a million dollars.

Me: Oh good, because I'm only going to charge you the bargin price of $750,000.

Client: Um... Can we do that in installments?