Long time readers are probably familar with two things: Horror stories about my dental work, and my endless quest to find search software that'll let me make sense of my data hoard (because I never delete anything). Thankfully, the former's been fairly good lately so I don't have any real complaints there. Things have improved on the latter front, remarkably.

I've experimented off and on with a personal search engine called Recoll, which was designed to work alongside Linux desktop environments initially but later it was ported to Mac OS X and Windows. It is noteworthy in that it tries …

Still here. Still going. Getting ready for HOPE XI and trying to get everything buttoned up and bolted down at work before flying to the other coast for same. That all hell appears to still be breaking loose all over the world isn't helping matters any; I'm certainly not sleeping all that well, consequently.

Rehearsal of my talk for HOPE started today. I really suck right now and need to get this one banged out before I present. At least I've finally stopped writing and rewriting the slides and settled on the text.

This appears to be the week that …

Windbringer experienced an unexpected and catastrophic hardware failure last night after months of limping along in weird ways (the classic Dell Death Spiral). My backups are good and I have a restoration plan, but until new hardware arrives my ability to communicate is extremely limited. Please be patient until I get set up again.

Unfortunately, I spent much of last Friday asleep, recovering after a routine filling went south and turned into an emergency root canal. I don't know what does it about the procedure, but it wipes me out completely - it might be the body reacting to having a part of it removed with what amounts to tiny drill bits, or it might be the knowledge of it. For all I know, it could be the aftereffects of multiple injections of local anesthetic that happens to contain epinephrine, which would logically bring about a fight-or-flight reaction as the syringe-loads naturally leaked into the …

That's actually a pretty easy question to answer. First off, my job's kept me very busy the past couple of weeks - I've been spending between two and three weeks on the road for a while now, and when I'm not flying hither and yon work at the office has kept me running hard to stay in place. All things being equal, I've been more concerned with work and getting ready for the Yule holiday than I have about reading the newsfeeds and posting. That's not to say that I haven't been having wacky adventure, those seem to find me without …

I think the USB v2.0 chipset in Windbringer is failing - all USB v1.0 and v1.1 devices I've used work fine, but now the bottommost jack is acting flaky. All storage devices plugged into the bottom are unreliable, and vanish (from the OS' point of view) randomly, leaving stale file handles and hung processes all over the place. I've seen this pattern of behavior before: Once USB fails completely, everything else tends to collapse like a house of cards during flu season.

Stopgap measure: Purchase a USB v2.0 PCMCIA card. Going to do that tonight.

Solution #1 …

Things have finally slowed down somewhat in Austin, affording me the opportunity to write a long-overdue update. Workdays have been long (averaging thirteen hours out of every twenty-four), which is why I've been quiet lately.

From what I've seen of Austin, it's a pretty nice place. I"m situated a stone's throw from the airport, and within visual distance of the highway system, which has been both relaxing (coming from an urban background) and a pleasant change of pace from the places that I'm usually put up by my employers.

Two nights ago Tiffany (co-worker and fellow foot soldier fighting …

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 …