Tomorrow may be Mother’s Day but I always say that every day is Father’s Day. Most days, I really believe it.
These past couple of days have been pretty trying, though. Between my struggles to get this video burned to a CD, to my washing machine flooding my basement, to my dishwasher breaking, all in the past 24 hours, it’s been pretty annoying.
My computer struggles have been more time-consuming: it seems that the old FrankenMac that I am using for this is mostly memory challenged. 384 Mb isn’t enough, nor is 3.5 Gb of swap space. The components are a Rev 1 Blue & White with a G4 upgrade, its own internal 12 Gb drive, an internal DVD burner, an 80 Gb drive hanging off the FireWire bus, and the aforementioned 384 Mb of RAM. The DVD burner was external as well, but old school USB was so slow, I had to give that up and put it inside.
A couple of attempts to make it all work ended in failure as the box thrashed itself into a stupor. My latest attempt has me moving /var/vm to the FireWire drive with a symlink (directly after booting so make sure the swapfile is not being used). I initially moved a whole bunch of directories to the external drive but that only bought 5 Gb of space: if 3.5 wasn’t enough, I bet 5 won’t be either.
Now things look a little more possible:
Filesystem Size Used Avail Capacity Mounted on
/dev/disk1s3 82G 39G 43G 48% /Volumes/backup
It will take hours, all the same, but perhaps this time it will run to completion.
Then my to-do list is augmented with fixing the washer drain (it flows into a concrete(!) utility sink and if anything blocks the drain — like an errant sponge — instant deluge). But before that, we get to shop for a new dishwasher. (How else would you spend Mother’s Day?) The latch just broke off inside sometime today. So I had to get medieval on it to get it open so we could hand wash the breakfast and lunch stuff that was in there. Then I get to replace it.
One upside is that the nice fellows from 1-800-GOT-JUNK are coming Monday to get a cat-wrecked sleeper sofa: they can take the dead dishwasher as well, with any luck.
And even if I were to somehow find a job to pay for any of these little incidents (to say nothing of my broken teeth and resulting reconstruction), I’d have to quit in 7 weeks when school gets out.