Good Wayne

Headaches

We finally broke down and bought a laser printer. I've had this color inkjet from back when they were pretty new in the late 90s. But for the last couple of years, the gripping mechanism that grabs the paper has been slipping. It was now at the point where if you wanted anything printed, you had to babysit it and force feed the paper. Which is a real bitch for anything over two pages. So we bit the bullet and got a nice one that’s network friendly; now the kids won’t have to bother me about cross-network printing either.

But, it’s never easy. As noted elsewhere the house is too damned small. There’s no physical space for this printer to occupy. The shelf the inkjet sat upon is just not wide enough for the printer to sit comfortably and still be easy to access. So now a great juggling act begins and it ends with the compromise of the entire Lego collection going up into our bedroom. Of course it wasn't that quick or simple, but that was the end result.

It means we have to rearrange our bedroom, put off building the closet and then rearrange what is now my Lego area into a computer area. I’m not happy about that. I know Tine isn't happy about it either. But there’s no way around it. I have too much stuff. I can’t even gauge if I’ll actually get to use it more or less by doing this. I’m afraid it will be less, which will probably reduce me to zero as I can’t get as much use out of it as I would like right now.

My next big headache was an actually headache. A lingering migrainesque throbbing headache. I was up late on Saturday and TheBoy had a nightmare around 4 AM keeping me from getting any real sense of sleep until the much later in the morning. Even then I woke up Sunday about 10 with a wicked headache. I should have stayed put, but I didn't. At first getting up, taking some aspirin and having coffee seemed to work. TheBoy was watching The Empire Strikes Back on the big TV and that was okay. But we had moved the PS2 to the widescreen as well, and TheBoy got me playing all kinds of things with him after the movie.

It did my head no good to be wondering how to maneuver Spongebob through the Ghost Prison of NickToons Unite! and soon I was back to popping more painkillers and searching for dark rooms. I spent most of the day watching the History channel with the lights off.

Which is unfortunate, because I would have seen this next problem a lot sooner if my brain hadn't been trying to rip itself from my skull all day.

My hosting service had suspended all my pages. They had emailed me and setup a job ticket, but, thanks to the migraine, I didn't see it until much later in the day. Someone had hacked into my site and uploaded a slew of files and folders to use the site as a spam generator. It took me a good chunk of the night to get it resolved. Mostly because the links they originally provide for me to fix things were invalid or out of date by the time I went to use them. This mean waiting for them to respond on the job ticket (which they did faster than I expected, but it was still time consuming). But a few deletions later and a complete uninstall of the other site (mostly because I'm not sure what to do with it still and I'm fairly confident that's where the exploit came from) and it's all back online.

What a great weekend.

On the RSS feed this post is titled "We finally broke down and bought a laser," so after that the real story was kind of a letdown. You were only one word away from having a weekend that was totally awesome.