So much to do - so little time. Looks like I'm gonna' have to have my night shift boy do some programming for me. An inventory database. But no propietary software. Flat files. Then slap it on the web. Just guitars and horns. I notice the gear shop down the street has a worse website than mine. Cool. Opportunity knocks.

Had Mikey (the accountant) draw up some curves and graphs and squiggly lines to present to the board. Some interesting numbers. As of today, the average gross for the last three years has been surpassed. But looked at in another way, the entire rest of the year is business growth. An entire quarter - including Christmas. All is not entirely rosy, as my expenses are much higher than my predecessors. But just like the stock market, it's nice to look at a spreadsheet and see green somewhere - anywhere.

Oh, and the computer still seems to be working. Maybe I'll get brave again and try un-archiving all those files. Or not... I haven't really had much of a need to get at any of those files. All written in another era - most even predate the web.

The coffee house on the corner is going internet cafe. You wouldn't think much of this, but it's a sign of where it's all going. The net is going to be everywhere. I'm not sure I'm going to do that anytime soon - because I'm not sure I want people comparison shopping at will.

Hmmm... Here's another way out of the mideast mess, but it's not completely feasible in the 21st century. The palestinians didn't do too bad under british stewardship. what if something like that could be re-created... it could provide some stability and an acting police force whilst waiting for the palestinians to figure out how to run a country. israel isn't likely to attack the british. but nobody would ever agree to such a thing in today's climate. maybe france? anything but the u.n.. they were too instrumental in causing this mess.

The computer is still working. Yay. (Said with very little enthusiasm). Tonight got the camera working. I'll figure out the automounter another time. Got the camera working he says... Perhaps I failed to mention just exactly how difficult that was. In between customers I was online reading through the bowels of the kernel. Yuck. None of it matters anymore. The eyes have glazed over. I'm still a code warrior, still a geek.

Yay! The new Yellow Pages just hit the stands. The ad looks great. It better work as designed, it's costing me through the nosebleed...

Went to the beach...

But wait, it gets worse.... Nope, it wasn't a cosmic ray. Something still isn't right. That disk went dead yesterday afternoon. Same symptoms, different drive. On bootup, the Maxtor label reported by the firmware got transformed into Laxtnr and reports half the capacity. Uh oh. we've got a bad bit. It's not the drive at all - it's the cable. But the same bit is there elsewhere. Intermittent connection on one of the timing lines. Yucko. Pulled that out and dropped another in. Now both previously fried drives are humming nicely. Linux installs without a hitch. But I'm pretty jaded. I've pretty much rebuilt the computer in the last few weeks, except for the motherboard. Wonder how long it will last until that goes... To be fair, this is the very same IBM clone computer I started with 15-20 some odd years ago. Everything has been replaced three or four times now. Well not quite. It still has the original 5-1/4 diskette and I'm still using the same keyboard.

Go through the operating system installation once again. OK, four more times. A cosmic ray of some kind interrupted the first install and it left things in a messy state that took a bit of hacking to clear up again before the installation could proceed normally. This has been quite a saga. And then there's the whole configuration thing and loading all my data (or trying to) once again. Think I'll just do a basic setup and let this thing hum for a while and find its zen again before trying to do anything else with it. On the bright side - I've made copious notes and all the details are still fresh so it should be a bit easier and faster this time around.

When it rains....

11:30 PM. Finished installing the new power supply. Everything working, all systems go. Get some much needed sleep. 8:30 AM. System is dead. Crashed. Disk gone, totally un-recoverable. This is the brand new hard drive I put in last week. Sigh... This is why you don't buy the inexpensive brand. Back to square one. Start the entire process over again. I could toss out a litany of cuss words to describe this event, but I know better. It's a poster event for why I no longer wish to do this kind of stuff for a living.

It also helps to solidify my choice to put critical business records on the computer. Yeah, right.

Like I said, one day at a time. I was trying to load in the old SCSI disks (with the last decade or two of data I'm trying to keep) and shorted out the power supply whilst trying to hot-swap the drives. Sigh... the fuse inside which is supposed to protect the components in case of a short didn't blow. Which means the components did. Who designed this thing? Could probably find the fried parts and spend a month trying to get replacements. Or just go back to the store again and get a new power supply. Twenty years ago, the former would've been the cheapest and fastest way (you could still get most of the parts at Radio Shack). Nowadays it's the latter.

Add Jack-in-the-Box to the list of corporate executives that should be tried on drug charges. No, not selling them - taking way too many. The latest has Jack set to open gas stations and mini-marts in Alabama. Investore are rightly concerned. Dog-food company turned fast-food king goes into the gasoline business during a particularly dubious period of middle east uncertainty. As is they lucked out and got a heck of a lot of mileage out of that toy mascot which was created thinking the baby boomers were playing with, well jack-in-the-boxes. They had already grown up by then. The marketing department is stuck in 1965. That's when convenience stores and gas stations and greasy assembly-line burgers took off.

Mikey (the new accountant) might just be onto something. If you recall, I had no idea how to pay for all this stuff I was buying. The only way is to sell a nice guitar and a tenor sax before month end. Mikey's philosophy is that you just gotta' believe. Just found a new home for a tenor sax. That should push off the creditors another two weeks. But I need to say that it's not very comfortable living this close to the edge...

The network printer is also working just fine, as I knew it would. Of course nothing's a slam-dunk with software - I had to check. Another checklist item down.

The headlines today are something to the effect of 'Iraqi Leader Blinks' and 'Saddam to Allow Weapons Inspections'. C'mon - we've been through this before. Y'all have short memories. He agrees to allow inspections just long enough to break up the coalition building against him. Then he kicks them out as soon as they start poking around his secret chemical and nuclear plants. It's only happened - what a dozen or so times now.

Coulda' rented two dozen cellos if I had 'em. As is, I've got about a dozen out. But I'm holding the line. Half of these will break within two years. But if they don't - I've got to put them all somewhere next summer. Might be able to store a dozen - but two? Don't think so. That's a lot of space. The calls keep coming in, and unfortunately I'm about the only place around that rents them at all. It's a very tempting business opportunity, but cellos are a loss leader. Lucky to break even before they even break. Sigh...

However, as I sell a few craft guitars, I think I'll put the money more into cellos than more guitars.

Haven't yet looked at the test page from the printer. I'll get to it. It will reputedly work with my camera though - but only with bleeding-edge kernels. I'll try that RSN as well. Right. It should still do what I need without crashing. The Palm works just fine.

One day at a time. It's the only way. Slowly but surely, everything is correctly configured. Today was the Palm Pilot and the network printer. Just the words network printer should give you an idea of the hassle involved. Every time I print a test page, 26 blank pages are received by the printer. Don't worry, I've got a hack for this one too. But it's almost midnight and I can't tell if my later test pages printed well without waking people up. Just do the same stuff I did at Stanford ten years ago. It'll work. This is Unix. But I still have to give a thumbs up to the guys who made pilot-xfer work. It's basically the Palm Pilot HotSync but written in geek. I can do some things with it that are like insane. Like collect on address cards every address that sends me email in a month and that I don't delete. You get the idea. Pretty much anything you want to do can be turned into a script and run from anywhere in the world. Lessee, the next big test is if I can get Linux to read my digital camera USB output (looks like a disk drive electronically). Once I get that going it will spell the end of MicroSoft Windows in my household. I've got everything I need, thank you. Don't need your badly written software.

Now I'm researching the CD-writable support for Linux. Somebody wrote a bare-bones program a few years back that only worked with SCSI drives. Then they went off to gainful employment and let the program flounder. It still seems to work so nobody is messing with it. But... very few folks have SCSI re-writables. Most are IDE. Here's the documented solution - you install a driver which masquerades an IDE drive as a SCSI drive. OK, that would probably work, but it's what is known in the industry as a hack. How hard could it be to write a driver table? But I'm not going to write it... Not if I've got a hack that works. Same reason nobody else has fixed it yet.

Configuring a server takes time - no escaping it. But I'm working all day and need to have some time with my daughter in the evening. Where does the time come from? A: The late hours.

But sacrificing sleep for technology has a price. The alarm clock went off for over an hour before I noticed it. 8:10. Have to get Bella up and into the classroom by 8:30. Ended up two minutes late. Can't do that again.

So how do we slow down or stop Saddam's arsenal building without destabilizing the entire silk road? We can't. It'll just pour more gasoline on that fire. But george has a vendetta. Finish his dad's war. Sigh...

Hmmm. September eleven. Why does that date sound familiar? Lessee. one of my relative's birthdays? Did I forget to buy a gift again? No that wasn't it. Must be something else...

Speaking of fail-safe. The moment of truth is near. Finally got the Unix server into a state of zen once again. But this is the server which carries a legacy - I've got records of most everything I've typed into a CPU for the last twenty years or so. Software (about 300 different programs), emails, you name it. Probably still have some newsfeeds from when I was telling Marc Andreessen about the limitations of image tags on picture data. But that drive went up in smoke. No problem. I've still got the original hard drives and an interface that can read them. Nyah, nyah. And I've got tape backups in two locations with interfaces and software that can read them. But being smug once doesn't prevent future disasters. It's less nyah, nyah and a little bit more whew.....

In fact I had been preparing to migrate this data onto CD-ROM, which would ensure its survival another five years or so. Didn't happen. I've one more chance.

Hey Mikey... (the accountant). How we doin'? Almost breaking even? All the rental profits went to pay off those publishers and other folks who gave me 'fall dating'. I bought stuff on credit. Ouch. Wrong. Can't do that. But now to cover that mistake and move on. A few mistakes from three or four months back are coming home to roost. There's only one way out. I need to sell a really nice guitar and a tenor sax this month. I need to be especially wary of purchases. Makes no sense to restock a lot of the band stuff I'm out of because the demand will be next to zero a week from now. I need to use whatever I've got to make ready for the next big thing. That would be Christmas. The new Yellow Pages hit in a few weeks or less. The rentals are paid three months in advance. So the next time that I see cash from them is in December. So now everything will likely go into hibernation for a couple of months whilst I try to locate instrument coffee mugs and other under $20 gift items with a musical theme. Then I'm hoping I'll need a seat belt for the ride ahead.

Just found two more brand new good trumpets that got overlooked as they were piled with the cheap Chinese ones. Cool. I've still got stuff.

Now I face a technical dilemna. The rental accounts are all paper based. This is good. But I've got a lot of accounts to process - and even more going forward. I have to automate it. No problem, could probably do that in a couple of weeks. But therein lies the rub. I would then be dependant on the software I used to manage accounts. And I need to have a computer terminal at the register and fail-safe. Ouch. It's that fail-safe part. Not just safe from accidental loss, but also from technical obsolescence. I've done all this before, but it's a lifestyle, not just a database. Religious daily backups and transaction logs. Backup media in two locations. Going back to the beginning. No commercial software. Write your own in K&R C and stdio. You'll have to modify it every few years to migrate your media onto the latest and greatest thing. Oh, and not just two locations, but you have to have two backups for every interval of interest. Whoa. It's a trap no matter what way you go. Paper records aren't looking so bad now, but it's sure a lot of scribbling one day each month.

Yesterday was spent primarily catching up on housework, like installing pet doors and kid gates. Not for Bella, she can open any of those things. It's mostly to keep the pets separated.

Today, just a normal day for once. Whew. I survived.

Last day to get band instruments. And I still have a couple. And it's the downtown Wine/Art festival. Could be insane today...

Locked the door at 6. By that time all the patrons were looped and I was already paranoid. Haven't yet done the damage assessment. Busy day. Bella set up a lemonade stand at the end of the counter and made a relative fortune for a five year old. We let her buy a dress for her favorite doll. It was pure profit and it was hers. Rest goes in the bank. I chastised several patrons for grabbing the guitars without asking. On a normal day I'll usually let it slide, but there are large quantities of alcohol being served. I need to know if the lights are on and there's anybody home before you grab a thousand dollar guitar. And that's what I told 'em.

The RedHat Linux installation is certainly better than the old days, but these young programmers haven't yet learned about EAGAIN. When you're trying to access the disk way too fast, it sometimes reports back an error. Younger programmers just treat any error as a serious condition and either ask you what to do or bail completely. Even younger ones ignore errors completely. But the error code EAGAIN means you can silently go back and try again and the odds are high it will work. If it doesn't, it will give you a more serious error. So I was up most of the night, and after some sleep continuing this morning - to click the retry button every five seconds or so in order for the installation to complete. There's no way out except for completion or killing the power and starting over. The other thing which is needed is for the option of skipping a particular software package if just one file is causing a problem. When it's reporting the error, you can't change or inspect the disk (without powering down and starting over). Ah yes, I remember those days. Unix programmers generally don't have a Usability Engineering department. Well, I've got the source. Suppose I could fix it and send it to them. Clicking the mouse all night isn't going to win over many Windows refugees. The Unix community still needs to do better.

12 hours later and the zen is with me again. Food, clothing, shelter, Unix and a fat pipe. Brings back some memories. I can survive without a telephone or even without a car. But gotta' have my net and all the tools to see everybody who's playing on my wires. No, not in the computer room - in the bedroom. The universe is once again in balance.

Here's why Unix is cool. I'm gonna' take you back twenty years. Every computer had a group of people associated with it. In a heirarchy of groups and names and stuff. When you were in the same domain you could forget about this double-you-double-you-double-you-dot stuff especially since it didn't exist yet. It was bob@startrek, mike@jimi-hendrix. When you were on the same machine, it was just bill and patti and roberta. The key emphasis of the system is that it had (still does) all the essential elements of communication, along with computational and storage facilities for anybody with those needs. We had chat. We had email. Word processing software, spreadsheets. Software compilers and debuggers. Anything you ever needed in a computer. We could copy files to any machine that would trust us. Webs of trust extended into larger communities. I had legitimate accounts on various NASA computers scattered across the country. A few with ivy league colleagues. They all gave you a little disk space to store whatever you want. Unix has typically home directories which are personal spaces shared amongst the community. Usually one guy gets what we call god or root powers. Everybody in the community is protected by the operating system from every other member of the community. With a little knowledge, you can further restrict who can see what if anything of your files. But that also means you can share this or that just by not protecting it. Somebody will go wandering through your home directory some day and get a little glimpse of how you organize data, and what you value enough to protect. Or they'll see nothing. oh, and every thing is lower case. upper case doesn't even exist. but let's get back to root. he is the human link between the community and the computer. he/she sees all. you have no secrets from root. they have access to every nook and cranny of the system, because they need to step in some times and figure out what's wrong and set it straight. Usually I was the dude. It's a powerful position. You can read everybody's email. But you better not unless you have permission.

I resolved the power problem by disclosing my policy - which is somewhat like a priest's confessional. I've seen a lot of stuff that people thought was private. It was a) in the line of duty, and b) never shared any knowledge with any human being. The secret stopped here. As a consequence, I know things I shouldn't know. And the members of 'my' communities respected me for it. I saw the flaming love letter. The psycho chick is worse than you thought. But my lips are sealed.

Alas, it's looking like the big rush is winding down. I wasn't forced to make any morally repugnant decisions. However I know that there's at least one district that doesn't start band until next week. Might have a few stragglers.

Time to take stock and get these shelves filled again...

Wish I could say that I've just been negligent in keeping up this web page and letting people know what's going on in my twisted brain. Fact is I've got more important things to do. My daughter has homework.

The last few days cannot be put into words. But I'll try. Rental season. I don't even know if I've faced half of it yet. But it doesn't matter. I've rented most everything that I'm willing to rent. I've learned how to size up a kid for a violin strung as a viola while answering 16 phone calls and filling out rental forms for two others with people lined up to the door. The customers have been extremely forgiving. It seemed to peak yesterday but business was better today. Partially it was a supply demand issue. I'm pretty much out of rental cellos, trombones, violins, trumpets and flutes. Have a couple of clarinets left. Oh, but I still have some instruments available for sale... My eyes are glazed worse than reading and memorizing the entire Sun-3 operating system. Well of course the entire 27 inches of manuals, but more importantly the source code. In raw numbers, I've got twice as many instruments out this second than the store has had since about 1972. And I'm turning people away because I'm theoretically out of instruments.

Truth is I'm not - and I'm now at a crossroads. A major moral dilemna. I've got shoddy and/or beaten up instruments which could easily be rented to these desperate folks. Up to this point I've prided myself on running a class act. Some of the instruments haven't been perfect, But they all look ok and sound ok. I've got a half dozen smelly trombones that I'd justassoon toss in the dumpster. Would I become unscrupulous and rent these to people? Ouch. We'll find out tomorrow. Everybody's out of trombones and I've got some. Oh, those new ones? Gone. The new violins? Gone. Everything's gone.

I'm out of a lot of stuff. I've got no time to even order new stuff. Some important stuff. Book one for violin and book two for clarinet. Violin rosin. But the customers today have already called around. They know the situation. Waited until the last minute not realizing the raw numbers of people doing the same thing. The competition? Same boat I'm in. They're out of everything that plays. Like me, they're thanking their lucky stars or whatever drugs helped them to survive the tornado. Scruples? This is getting scary. I've still got a half dozen of each brand new trumpets, clarinets, and flutes that aren't worth a goshdurn. In theory I could open in the morning and completely clean up the dregs. Why don't I? Because rental by definition means you're gonna' get it back again. Next summer. I'll have to find space for all of these things all over again and go through the same dilemna. But it's certainly intriguing, n'est ce pas?