So I woke up rather late today, not feeling so great. A bit light in the head. I feel like I’m getting an inner ear infection… We’ll see what I feel like tomorrow.

I took a shower quite quickly and managed to get myself in the exploder fast enough to get to the mailbox by 1330. Since there was, in all likelihood a check in the mail for Dad that needed to be deposited, I needed to get that done by 1400. Not much of a problem, really. Sure enough, there were several envelopes that appeared to contain checks. I’m not sure why these envelopes are plainly different from the ones that contain bills, but I’ve yet to get it wrong. I tossed them on the floor of the exploder, and started driving to the bank, when I realized I didn’t have a deposit slip. Not much of a problem, I could always ask them for one… Except that I had NO IDEA what dad’s account number was. And, I didn’t know for sure if they’d give it to me. So rather than chancing it, I decided to go get the deposit slip, because I knew I’d still have enough time to get to the bank before 1400.

Fine, until I climbed out of the explorer and walked to the front door, and reached my hand in my pocket, and then the other. And then sighed and walked back to the exploder. Not finding my keys there either, I cursed. Then I thought about possible methods of entry to my house. Only possibly non-destructive one I could come up with was climbing a wall to the window I might have left open. Climbing at least 10 feet seemed unlikely and even more unlikely that I could accomplish such a task in time to get to the bank by 1400. So, back to the mailbox where I must have left my keys. Probably hanging out of the mailbox–I’d done that before. Never got farther than the door of my car before because the keys are all on one ring. But since I was driving the Exploder (because the front side of the Miata’s engine is in pieces) my keys were not tied to my current method of transportation.

I walked in, and my box was closed and locked. “Marrion, have you seen my keys?” She looked at me strangely, and said “Uhh.. no… you drove away, so didn’t you have them?”

“No, this isn’t my car…”

“I’ve noticed you’ve been in the big red thing instead of the small red thing.”

“yeah, rub it in, why don’t you.”

“Don’t like it?”

“No.”

“Guess it doesn’t go zoom-zoom,” she empathized. I sighed, thanked her, and left wondering if she knew my car was a mazda and associated it with the current mazda “zoom-zoom” ad campaign (which, by the way, I don’t much like), and decided that she had not, and it was a fitting coincidence. If you look for something, you’ll find it. Whether it’s there or not.

I subjected the passenger side floorboard to a detailed search, and finally found my keys under the passenger seat. I growled, and by now it was nearly 1400. I sighed, and realized there was no chance I was going to make the deposit on time.

I got home and desired to check my email. Since my bad IBM drive had finally munched through enough data that windows wouldn’t stay booted (immediate blue screen in kernel32.dll, never a good sign), that I would need to coerce linux into doing my bidding. A working (more or less) linux installation was sitting on a SCSI drive which was unaffected by the recent demise of my RAID array. After watching reassuring boot-up, I tried to configure my system to talk to Dad’s. Dad’s now possessed the DSL modem, as I hadn’t another win2k box to put it on. Dad’s system seemed quite unwilling to be a server, though it did relay a few pings, which was thoughtful of it.

Surprisngly enough, my wanna be router (linux box with lots of NICs) was graced by Dad’s computer forwarding just about anythign it wanted. So I climbed the many steps and cursed at Dad’s computer. (It helps… Me, not it)

After several trips up and down the stairs I finally realized that Dad’s computer was actually operating the firewall software I’d installed on it, even though the GUI for the service wasn’t active. So, after firing it up, and adding my system’s new IP to it’s list of acceptable associations, everything worked just fine.

I then convinced K-mail that talking to bellsouth was okay, and it provided me with 120 or so messages. The joys of mailing lists.

At least on my outlook express set up, the mailing list mail gets nicely sorted into appropriate folders so I need not manually sort through it in order to get to the important stuff. And, it’s much easier to read miata mailing list messages separate from Linux-ATM-development mailing list messages. It’s very frustrating for my brain when I read “Lately, I’ve noticed this smell of antifreeze after a hard run…” followed by, “I too have had problems with pppd, but under linux-2.4.15-pre2 with the following error codes, thanks to my serial console…” followed by, “I think my crank angle sensor is leaking oil…”

Among all this email, I found one from Dan Pedroza at Mazda South, with a subject of “Eeek!” I know what it was about, and was hopping it wouldn’t be there. Mazda South is a friendly Mazda dealter in Austin, TX from whom I order parts. They’ve been good to me, and I feel better about giving them my money than the local grubby dealers. (a visit to a local dealer involves a long, messy drive, followed by messy parking, and endless waiting in line to be told they don’t have the part, but can order it sometime next month if i’m nice and pay them $860.43 for the heck of it) Dan at Mazda South is typically there when I call, and gets my parts out to me soon, and usually the amount I save from buying from him makes up for shipping cost, and I don’t have to pay tax.

Anyway, I knew what it was about because my bank account currently has $6.21 in it, and I was hoping that ammount included my order from Dan, which I’d placed on Friday. (It seems the parts took awhile to get to dan, and since he hadn’t shipped them, he hadn’t billed my account yet.) So I tried to call him, but he wasn’t at his desk, and so I left a message with someone. Figures. And, since I was late with the deposit, who knows when Dad will be able to give me a little more money…

A few moments later the phone rang. I picked it up, expecting Dan. But it was Dad instead. “Was there any money in the mail?”

“Umm.. Yeah.. but.. the deposit didn’t go in for today.”

“Shit.”

“Sorry.”

“Okay…” (followed by a sigh).

I called Dan back a half hour later, and he’d already left for the day.

I’ve spent most of the day fighting with linux. KDE takes forever to compile, and it’s quite frustrating to be waiting for a compile only to have it terminate because it’s misisng a library, and then you download the library, and then it won’t compile…. Remind me again why I want to be a geek?