Family Friendly Games: Blog Posts

Moving to new home

Bryan Wagstaff

Well, I'm finally moving.

Moving the web host.

Although I really, really, really like going through my local provider xmission.com, I just can't continue to pay their prices. So I'm moving over to somewhere else. It means I get to work on the web site a lot, which has been fun. It will take another two or three weeks before everything is up and running.

Finally got everything running on IX.

Bryan Wagstaff

I've finally got everythin moved across. Yay.

It's been a couple weeks in progress, but I think I'm ready to dump xmission. I hope to only have a tiny more work in the transition. My planning has it down to three more evenings before everything is ready.

Another evening, more work, and a treat for the birds.

Bryan Wagstaff

What a day.

I don't really remember the morning very much. I think I blocked out the parts about finding out that an important email that was supposed to be delivered at 10 AM got stuck in the email queue inside the corporate servers until 8:30 pm. Oops! Fortunately I had sent a cc: to myself and noticed that it arrived several hours too late. When I saw it, I immediately replied to all, told them that I really did send it in the morning, and pointed out the first part of the email header that had the early time stamp.

I guess I'll be emailing AND calling next time.

Today after work, I took the girls out while my wife went to her voice lessons. We went to the pet store and bought some food, a cuttlebone, and a toy. It's a four inch (or so) thick bamboo pole roughly 10 inches long. It has a few starter holes drilled in it. The inside of the bamboo pole is spongy and should be fun for the birds to hollow out. I'm curious to see if they just rip it to shreds or will form it in to a nest.

Now that the core of everything is transferred over to IX, I'm hoping to finish getting the database records archived and payment mechanisms in place tonight and Saturday. I'm a little wary of closing off the account before everything is empty, because I don't know when they would purge it. Would they wait until the end of the billing cycle, or would they immediately kill it? I guess I could email them and ask, but it would be tomorrow before the billing staff is there, and I might be finished by then.

-b

What a Thanksgiving holiday!

Bryan Wagstaff

On Tuesday of this week, Carrie started with a stomach illness and fever. On Wednesday at work, I fell ill. Later that evening, Katherine and Sarah both succumbed with fevers. With most of the house sick on Thursday morning, the feast was postponed until further notice.

The holiday was spent in idleness around the house. Those who were sick spent the time sleeping or watching movies. Those who were not sick played with the neighbor kids. Fortunatly everybody is feeling better today -- friday evening -- so hopefully we can cook and enjoy the turkey before the weekend is over.

What's that grinding noise coming from my computer?

Bryan Wagstaff

Both computers died. I suspect that our two-year-old discovered the computer would make interesting noises if she repeatedly power-cycled the box while Windows was starting up. She also didn't check to see if the machine was already running at the time.

Sarah lost some critical OS files and could no longer boot. I was getting ready to repair it (yay Knoppix!) but she asked if I could just wipe the whole thing out and preserve all her documents, including her rather large database. That was not a big deal for me, I just needed to transfer the important data and then spend time babysit the installation processes and restore everything when done.

I backed everything up, wiped the machine, and began restoring everything. I had spent two days in the install process.

I should have noticed that the two-year-old had given up on trying to play on mom's machine because it had no account for her, and mom was refusing to play any games on it (because they weren't installed.) So she decided to repeat the procedure on my computer....

After two days of working on Sarah's machine, I came home from work to discover that my own machine was in an unstable state. One of the girls saw the two-year-old playing with the power button but apparently did nothing to stop her. It seems she liked watching the lights turn on and off.

So I spent another few days recovering my own machine.

Sarah's machine isn't fully restored yet, but it has come a long way.

What a waste of a week and a half.

Both machines are now bios password protected so future power-cycling will only go through a single catastrophic event rather than a series of them.