I haven't put code to disk in a month. My job and hardware troubles have consumed all my spare time.

Working for Direct Holdings Worldwide (the company that purchased Time Life) sucks. The company is really behind Internet marketing and e-commerce, but I've spent a year disabling our systems per the last round of company directives. Now I'm swamped with prioritized requests to restore or create new features for the site.

I bought my daughter, Indy, an iBook for her birthday. I'm sure I was very irresponsible giving a five-year-old a notebook computer, but she really enjoys it. Every morning a 8 AM I wake up to a twisted combination of Queen, Wiggles, Travis, and Sesame Street bellowing from her iTunes collection. I put an Aircard in, but I doesn't talk TCP to the Linksys or DLink WAPs I have. I've spent days working on the problem; the iBook sees the network and had a good signal, but I cannot make a route. I've given up. She's using a wireless bridge to get to the Internet.

I added a second drive to my wife's win98 computer a few years ago. I set the machine up so all her data was on that drive, thinking I was protecting all that was important. I even managed to move her Outlook mail to data drive. That drive failed. The drive cannot read--a hardware failure, possibly because a virus arrived in her inbox and it fried the disc thinking it was the usual C: drive. She' missing about 12 months of photos. I don't see how I can get them back without replacing the hardware in the drive.

Coincidentally, or maybe not, I did some stupid things to my own disk. The /etc dir lots big chunks, and other dirs too. There were too many pieces in /lost+found to restore. So I decided to rebuild the whole disk and finally upgrade to Fedora. This is the third major rebuild in 3 years. the first two times were from bad drives in my Dell Latitude. My Toshiba drive was good so I decided I should take the crisis as a clue-by-four and partition my hard drive right. I've never understood why Redhat/Fedora defaults to a single partition. I

I've rebuilt GNOME with jhbuild with no trouble. Hurray! All GNOME was a pain to rebuild in January. I'm pleased to see the Medusa truly works on a virgin system. It indexed my 3G of data in a scant 15 minutes. All is where it was 30 days ago. I never like February anyway. I just pretend it didn't happen and carry on with a metadata daemon to replace Medusa's database.