‘Til All Are One

I left to Melbourne on Friday night and got back at 2am Wednesday. It’s Friday now. I wanted to write something here earlier but I got lazy.

In short: I had a great time. I really needed to unwind, and now I feel much more relaxed.

Now I’ve got a huge backlog of stuff to do. I had been putting off numerous things for several months, and now that I’m back I can finally do them. The funny thing is that I don’t know where to start. I hate starting things. Once the ball is rolling I’m fine, but the hardest part is getting the ball to roll in the first place. I’ll take each day as it comes.

I had set my mail client (Sylpheed-Claws) to automatically collect my mail every fifteen minutes while I was away. I’m subscribed to several high-volume mailing lists, so I needed to do this to prevent my mail accounts from filling up. Unfortunately, Sylpheed-Claws screwed up and stopped retreiving mail at some point. Fortunately my boxes weren’t full. Next time, I’ll write a script to retreive my mail and have cron execute it periodically. I wanted to do that this time, but I ran out of time. I had a couple of thousand e-mails when I returned. I didn’t think it was worth suspending my mailing list subscriptions for only a few days. I deleted most of them, so now I’m back on track.

It seems like a zillion things have happened while I was away (I wasn’t keeping tabs on the news while I was gone). For instance, there are heaps of cool posts on PCLinuxOnline that I want to read. Here in Sydney, our dry, hot summer weather has helped to create a huge bushfire problem. I don’t live anywhere near the bush and yet I can see and smell smoke. Many people have even lost their homes to the fires On Wednesday, the fires somehow managed to cut the power to my house. Apparently huge areas of Sydney have been affected. There goes my two months of uptime! I had half a day without electricity, and another half day cut off from US Internet sites. Australian and European sites loaded fine, but I couldn’t access US sites like PCLinuxOnline. Everything seems to be fine now, so I can quit complaining.