After investigating the usual causes for blue screens of death - bad drivers, incompatible software, rogue code, etc - I've come to the conclusion the drive itself is showing the same signs my servers showed before. These things manifest more subtely on Windows boxes and if I hadn't suffered so many failures before I might have missed it entirely.

So once more, Hitachi will save my behind from another big fat mess. And to think, I just put the bloody drive back into a brand new motherboard and CPU and this is the thanks I get. At least the data is still readable so I can take the drive in and use the cloning machine at work.

And again, for the love of God, nobody buy Western Digital! This is just plain stupid!

Obviously that was an illusion. I came home from work to check the box and found the system throwing all sorts of bad node errors, it refused to allow logins, and had to be forced off at the power switch. The filesystem went through another forced check after booting up.

So I get to spend part of this weekend on another drive replacement. For the love of God, don't buy Western Digital! Their quality has gone down the shitter in a relatively short time. This will be my FOURTH dead drive in a year. 

This just leaves having to cleanup implementation decisions that didn't go quite as planned, like making the command table into a std::map. I hadn't counted on that wiping out the ability to set command priorities. So that will need to be undone. I apparently also broke one of the basic mob keyword lookup functions and the results of that are somewhat.... strange.

All in all, after all this time, it looks like the string converson has gone remarkably well. Things certainly could have turned out much worse. Of course, this is only the first stage. I still have many classes and structs to convert, but the bulk of it is done now. 

I appear to be running into this myself lately. Though I still enjoy coding, I find myself more and more simply not wanting to even though I've got things lined up I'd like to get done. I usually end up messing with the Sandbox code on my blog, or fiddling with something in QSFP, or even just sitting online for awhile BS'ing about stuff with others. Even pointless random surfing takes hold and before I know it half a day has gone by :P

Maybe I'm just being silly. I wouldn't say I'm burned out just yet, but it's certainly possible. So what all do people do to find that missing motivation? 

Don't ever let this happen to you folks. MAKE BACKUPS. Automate the process if you're lazy, like me, and force yourself to keep up on it. Complacency is the devil. 

The irony here was that I was just about to make a global backup of all of the MySQL databases. I think it sensed my intent. The command issued, all the files were created, and then nothing. The thing began clicking and seconds later the kernel panicked and the system rebooted. It became stuck at the BIOS screen, unable to reboot.

The timing on this couldn't have been worse. The middle of the night, on a Saturday. I've got a voicemail in to an emergency data recovery place that will not void the warranty on the drive but I'm not sure I'm too comfortable with the fact that the call went to voicemail. But as the last backups I took from the site are months old, I don't really see there being much of a choice. Damn life for not providing me the time to do this stuff properly.

I'm not particularly harsh on computers. It's not like I torture them to death with SETI folding or any of that other CPU-intensive crap. The servers lead decent lives as far as hardware goes. So why should a drive that's barely 6 months old just up and die? Is it too much to ask companies to make quality equipment anymore?

So anyway. Until I can get this resolved, the following sites will be offline:
www.arthmoor.com
www.smaugmuds.org
www.iguanadons.net
www.alsherok.net
Server02 for the MudBytes IMC2 network
My mud
And several other sites belonging to others.

Another 30 seconds was all I needed too.

Now I have this nice red gouge on the side of my finger next to the nail. It's a bit raw and makes typing somewhat less than pleasent. Which is a bad thing since my job requires so much of it. At least I didn't bleed on the server.

So the lesson learned here? Turn the blasted computer off before trying to clean the fans. And don't stick your fingers in where they don't belong. You're likely to get bit. 

In case you coudln't tell, it rained today :P Something we haven't seen in 150+ days here. It didn't last long though. Certainly didn't rise to the level the weather sites were saying. But it came, and we needed every drop.