I had a really interesting post about last weekend about halfway done and ready to post when the worst of all possible things happened: My workstation at work flamed out in a serious way. It's still in pieces all over the office and not operating because the RAID array - the disk mirror set up to prevent data loss in the event of a failure - blew up along with everything else. Systemware all over the place is corrupt, and I can't do much else other than log in as the root user and try to track down everything that's been damaged …

Well, let me see... it's been interesting times the past couple of days, which has left me precious little time to write about what's actually been going on with my day to day life lately.

First off, early last week Alphonse Elric, Lyssa's primary machine and workstation at home packed it in. One moment he was cunching merrily away, the next utterly locked up. No amount of rebooting or jiggling was able to bring him back online, though we did notice that the components inside of his silver chassis (as well as the exhaust fans and chassis itself) were horribly …