Day 162

Not a great day. When I went to fix my morning coffee, I noticed that a new piece of artwork in the kitchen had fallen off the wall and broken. I sorted through assorted canisters, glassware and spice bottles on the counter top where the small mixed-media sculpture had fallen, but I couldn't find the missing pieces. I did find a big cockroach hiding under the microwave, but that definitely wasn't what I was looking for. After breakfast, I turned on the office computer to start working and nothing happened. I think the power supply has finally burned out. Nothing I tried would bring the beast back to life. When I went to the storage warehouse to drag home a spare computer for the third time in less than a month, I noticed that there was a big nail in my rear tire. The tire was holding air, so I'll deal with that problem another day.

I have really got to become more disciplined about backing up everything to an external drive on a daily basis. It's becoming a huge hassle to take hard drives and memory out of one computer and put them in another, just so I can continue working. Unfortunately, not working just isn't an option. I had a meeting with one of my veterinarian clients around noon, but when I got up to the clinic, I discovered that the doc had been called away to perform an emergency surgery. I had to wait quite a while, so I had time to finally try out my new iPad. This seemed like a good time to answer today's e-mail. The 3G Internet connection on the iPad worked like a charm. Lots of spam was coming into my inbox, just like my other computers. I typed my messages on the touch screen keyboard and hit send. Nothing happened. After a while a message box appeared that said "SMPT Server Not Responding." Oops. I guess I didn't configure the e-mail client correctly. I can never remember the port numbers for the POP and SMTP servers, so I just gave up and read magazines in the lobby until the doc was ready to see me.

By the end of the day, I had managed to back up all my critical files on DVD disks and was limping along using an old obsolete Mac to finish my webmaster duties. I wish I was more of a pro-active person. I'm really good at reacting to a crisis, but I never plan ahead well enough to avoid the problems in the first place. I remember when I was younger and living in Seattle, I had a car with a dead battery. Instead of running out and getting a new battery right away like I should have, I parked on hills for almost a month and let the car roll forward for a bit to start it. This ridiculous plan actually worked, since there were steep hills both where I lived and where I worked. I never even considered what would happen if I had to drive somewhere where it was flat.

I guess I'm a bit like Dash. He's eating grass again today. I'm sure he never considered that eating grass is going to give him a bellyache about six hours from now, just like it always does.

Dalmatian of the Day

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