The MacDeskBlog

Michelle and I returned from our honeymoon last night. We spent five days in Cabo San Lucas. Hurricane John missed the area by about 80 miles three days before we got there. It looked like many people cancelled their trips because of the hurricane, which worked out well for us. The hotel was extremely quiet for the first few days, and was still pretty quiet this past weekend. A pleasant light rain fell from time to time on Tuesday through Friday. For the most part, we enjoyed partly sunny to mostly sunny skies, with Florida-like high-90s for both temperature and humidity. By Saturday morning, the clouds had vanished.

We both were ready for a rest. As a result, we didn’t venture very far from the pool and hence didn’t take many pictures on this trip.

Our wedding last Sunday was splendid. Michelle looked stunning in her gown. Her cousin did a great job performing the ceremony. A traditional sit-down, multi-course dinner reception totally is not our style. Instead, we opted for a cocktail party reception, which worked out great. Michelle kept people out on the dance floor all night. She insists that she’s not much of a dancer, but definitely showed otherwise, cutting the rug for nearly four hours.

On Monday, August 28th, the network which hosts the MacDesktops page server went offline. I didn’t think it would be a big problem, since the Mac Mini server hosting MacDesktops was on the same network as the company servers which provided the Mac Mini for me. “How long would they let their own servers remain offline?” “Not long,” I thought. Well, here it is two weeks later. I haven’t been able to make contact with them (emails, phone calls, YM messages all unreturned), and the servers are all still offline. I can only guess that they went belly-up.

There is never a good time for a server crash. I know this first hand a few times over now. That Monday when the server went offline, I was in the process of queuing up pictures to get the site through the wedding and honeymoon. I didn’t get very far. That Tuesday, I finally returned to work after three months of disability leave. That Thursday was my bachelor party. Friday, I picked up Michelle’s cousin at the airport and drove us down to Carmel, stopping to pick up tuxedos in Salinas along the way. Saturday, shockingly, between the rehearsal in the afternoon and the rehearsal dinner in the evening, I managed to find three hours to convert my development server, which resides on our home DSL line over to production usage, and queue up pictures to get through last week and part of this week. Sunday was the wedding. Monday – traveling back home and repacking. Tuesday morning – off to Cabo, leaving the PowerBook at home.

I didn’t plan on even taking the PowerBook to Carmel with me. Something changed my mind at the last minute, but I can’t for the life of me remember what it was. Grudgingly, I took it along, and ended up having just enough free time to get the site back online. Whatever the reason was which made me cave must not have been very important, because I didn’t use the PowerBook for any else during the weekend.

It’s time to go back to the grind. I hope site performance over DSL is acceptable for a while. I think it will be weeks before I get a new MySQL/PHP server online. My PayPal account looks like it will be able to handle it. My work schedule, on the other hand, is jam packed and getting jammier.