19 January 1998: The Mains Are Back On-Line

Monday, 19 January 1998:

The Mains Are Back On-Line

First things first: I've decided to do away with my Pobox.com address, due to the problems I mentioned yesterday. Since Pobox was just a relayer to my "physical" address, this is not a big change. And the Pobox address should continue to work for a while (until the account runs out, I guess).

Meanwhile, you should now e-mail me at rawdon@msn.fullfeed.com, and my Web page is now at http://www.msn.fullfeed.com/~rawdon/. This address will last until, well, until I switch providers, I guess.

Sheesh! This thing was a big enough problem that someone interested in buying some comic books from me faxed me his order, since his e-mail couldn't get through to Pobox. And he's in South America!

I've spent most of this evening continuing my hard drive restore. This involves making sure my server Web pages are in synch with the master copies on my Mac, and rebuilding all my BBEdit groups and configuration. Yawn! Still, I'm getting close to done. And BBEdit is friendly enough that I was able to change all the references to Pobox on all my pages to Fullfeed in just a few minutes. I don't know why such a simple thing - that I could write myself in just a few minutes - impresses me, but it does.

And since I'm still not too comfortable that this hard drive isn't going to crash on me (illogical as that is), I've faithfully backed up all the major work I've done this evening, so at least I won't have to do it again.

But, I think I'm nearly done. Woo-hoo!

My boss at work is traveling today and tomorrow, so I've been overseeing things temporarily. With the other senior-most programmer on the team leaving after Friday, we have a bunch of things we need to square away this week. Plus I need to keep the more junior programmers busy with stuff, which is difficult at this juncture since a "highly parallel" project has just reached a point where it's hard for more than two people to work on it at once.

It's always strange when I find myself in the de facto position of responsibility and authority; mostly I'm content to work on my own stuff in as much of a vacuum as is practical (less and less, these days). It's a nice change of pace, I guess, but not for me on a regular basis.

Having my computer down for a couple of weeks has encouraged me to try to spend a little more time away from it in the future. I think I'm going to shut down some of the ongoing projects on my Web page. No, this journal will keep going. But I'm going to stop being so aggressive about my book reviews page, and not worry so much about making my music and comics pages as comprehensive as they might be.

On the other hand, I want to write a Babylon 5 page, since I have a number of fairly concise and focused essays I want to write on the show. And I want to keep working on my baseball and Red Sox pages, since they're relatively low-effort.

It's time to spend more time with my cats and my other interests - and just maybe, with other people once in a while. (Maybe.)

Michael Rawdon (Contact)