Today was very mixed.
The Good:
- Went into the office and took many pictures of Project Code Name: Curious George. Why pictures were taken at the office and not at home will be obvious when I release the slides.
- Taking these pictures, and drawing some things up in Visio, I was able to finish the first draft of the slides for the presentation. Exported to PDF and distributed among friends asking for comments. Got some good ones and will be making some changes.
- I'm glad I was in the office today: Lots of things I had ordered showed up:
- The new motherboard for my home server (Intel Atom 230 based low power system)
- AC chargers for my iPhone (some of the ones I had for the 1st Gen don't work on the 3GS)
- At home, I also got the "second skin" protector thingie for my 3GS
The Bad:
- Looks like the good folks at DefCon don't have space in the normal speaking schedule for my talk. This is my fault to a large degree; when I submitted my talk to the Call For Papers, I put a huge disclaimer on it saying that it may or may not be ready in time and that I'd pull my request if it wasn't. I had hoped they'd consider the talk anyway, but apparently they didn't want to take the risk of a cancellation; I suppose I can't blame them, really. Anyway, they tried to fit it in and were unable. I made it clear that I'm flexible (in the schedule sense, not in the Yoga sense) and that if a spot _DID_ open up, to let me know. I'm not holding my breath. On the bright side, there are other opportunities to give presentations at DefCon: Skyboxes, the Hardware Hacking Village, B-Sides. So all hope is not lost. I just won't be getting a green badge. :-(
The Ugly:
- Well, poo. I received the new mother board for my failing server at home. I hoped to fix the system before leaving for the weekend so my neighbors (who use us for their Internet connection; yes, this is intentional) actually have a working Internet connection while I'm gone. To make a long story short and bulleted:
- The old mother board completely gave out (expected)
- The new mother board takes FOR-FRIGGIN'-EVER to POST. Seriously, the screen is blank for a good 120 seconds before anything shows up. The first time I installed it, I thought I had bad RAM. Anyway. It works.
- The hard drive (which was showing no signs of problems at all before this) is not being detected by either the new or the old motherboard.
So, now, I have a spiffy new low power server with no hard drive, no OS, and no time to fix it before the weekend... To say nothing of the 1TB of data on that drive... I made the call to the neighbors informing them that their DHCP/DNS/SMTP server is horked and instructed them on how to statically configure things to make it work for the weekend.
This is so bad, I can't find the words to express it...
Anyway. I'm getting prepped to go camping this weekend, to which I am very much looking forward. Not a great feeling to depart on, but I'll probably forget all about it this weekend and will deal with it on Sunday night when I return.
Be good humans.
-Mark