Until now. Here’s the two errors I received (click on them to view them full-sized); if I try to reload now I only get the second:

#1:

#2:

It hasn’t resolved itself yet, while I’ve been preparing this blog post so I assume it’s pretty serious.

Update (20:53): I just checked, and I was able to login and all my email appears to be intact, but when attempting to view an message I now get the following error:

Very strange, indeed. Not that it’s a big issue; just interesting.

First, the external speaker began to stop functioning; it would work on occasion – usually after a friendly whack – but you never knew when it might stop. More recently, the internal speaker (used for voice calls) began to fail as well. The same percussive maintenance usually managed to resolve the issue for a while; but again, you never knew when it would stop – usually at the most inopportune time.

Last Saturday afternoon, I was outside Ab Fab cakes – Justine’s working there every now and then – and tried calling Justine. After five or six attempts at trying to call, almost hearing a message, whacking the phone and trying again, I whacked a bit too hard and watched as the top part of the clamshell separated from the bottom.

Luckily, the thin cable connecting the top from bottom was intact; one of the hinges had separated. I tried pushing the displaced hinge back into its place, and just as I succeeded, the other hinge – the one through which the cable ran – snapped off, breaking the cable.

Obviously, it’s time for a new phone. I used my Ericsson t68 on Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday while searching for a new phone. Should I get an expensive Windows Smartphone, or opt for a cheaper model? I searched high and low on all of the Internets, and decided that the state of Windows Smartphones was not quite at a point with which I felt comfortable. So, instead, I bought a Nokia 6288 for less than half the price of the other phones I had been considering.

The phone is not perfect, but what phone is? Being a geek, I downloaded a “theme editor” from Nokia’s website and began geekifying the phone. Now, when I open up the slider, I hear the “Mario got a mushroom” noise, and when I close it, I hear the “Mario just shrunk” noise. The “extra life” noise is the SMS tone.

Which makes it all worth it.

Google Maps was the closest to the route I would have taken with one small exception: it had me exiting the freeway on an off ramp that doesn’t exist, to drive down a road that has no access to the freeway.

Might be a tiny oversight.

It’s now fixed, hurrah. Now your only excuse for not commenting is because you don’t want to.

Here’s the semi live-blog as I tried to fix things:

2006-06-07 10:34	Noticed the site was down. Can’t do anything while at work.
2006-06-07 11:45	Justine was unable to restart the computer under my remote guidance. Will investigate later.
2006-06-07 18:45	It appears that the hard disk that houses bludger.org and Juzzyweb has crapped itself. There is a database backup of bludger.org from May but I am unsure whether I can recover Juzzyweb’s database.
2006-06-07 19:20	I have been able to recover the “MYD” files which have the contents of all the posts (including the most recent ones). This means that all the data’s there, but it might be difficult to recover. It seems that ext2fsd has saved me an awful lot of grief… possibly. I still need to turn the data into meaningful information.
2006-06-07 22:35	Computers seem to be breaking all around me. Not only did the bludger.org/Juzzyweb host’s hard disk fail, but the computer I was attempting to setup as a replacement appears to have completely failed (I think it was the motherboard). The final spare machine is running well right now (touch wood) as I set it up as a web server, but as I was about to update this page, my main machine had a BSOD! What’s going on today?!
2006-06-08 00:20	Things are sort of working. The data is back into the database but because of the new version of Apache being used, things aren’t quite right. Will probably take more tweaking than I thought. For now though, it’s bed time.
2006-06-08 14:21	I’ve decided to move hosting off-site since I got a deal I couldn’t pass up, as you can read this it’s obviously on it’s way to working. Hopefully the full site will be back in a day or so.

The application running the advert loops on at least four of the TVs in two different aisles had crashed — in two different ways. From what I can remember (and I wasn’t really paying attention, which now isn’t helping as I attempt to recall), the software they were using is called “Mediabox” or similar.

So there you have it. What other public displays have you seen crashed? I recall seeing a large screen that regularly ran trailers at Village Knox in a crashed state. There’s a whole heap more over at windowscrash.com if you’re still interested.

Update: Just as I hit “submit” on this post, The Comedy Channel died and had a “please stand by” type message for around 5 minutes. I wonder if it’s me?

On Tuesday evening, as I was driving home, Justine called me to advise me that the globe in one of our lamps had blown. She asked me to drive to the local Bunnings store to pick up a couple of spares. I was sure that we actually had a spare hidden away somewhere; Justine found the spare, and the conversation ended.

When I arrived home, I was advised that the globe had not fixed the lamp; we assumed the lamp must be broken — no biggie, the lamp wasn’t really very expensive and maybe we could buy a nicer one this time. I went over to the computers to check if the newest episodes of Family Guy and Entourage had arrived, but on the way I noticed the fridge wasn’t making any noise, and our phone was off. Making my way through the house, I began to realise that there were very few appliances actually working.

I immediately assumed a fuse had blown, since some appliances were working and others (including the fridge) were not. I went outside to check the fuses and noticed we have three power circuits (not including the lights, hot water [pilot, I guess, since it's gas hot water], oven and overhead fan). I pulled the block thingamajig (this will be it’s official name from now on) out of all three and the fuse in all three was fine. Trying to do a bit more detective work, I used the block thingamajig from the working circuit in both the non-working ones. It made no difference.

After checking with the power company that nothing fishy was going on (maybe a weird brownout or something?) we then proceeded to call five 24-hour electricians, with none of them answering.

Next I called our estate agent, and advised her of the situation; she told me she’d call out an electrician first thing tomorrow morning.

That night (still Tuesday), we made dinner on our stovetop, but had to use a lighter since the electric starter wasn’t. After watching some TV, and then reading more of the new Harry Potter book (which I’d started while away in Tasmania), I proceeded to go to bed in a rather cold bedroom.

Wednesday I stayed home from work trying to contact our estate agent, who seemed determined to be uncontactable. Eventually I made contact and they advised they’d send around an electrician to fix it all. Justine came home from work around 10:00 and I went to work around 11:00. The first electrician arrived sometime after midday and advised that the entire house needed rewiring. This is a costly and lengthy process, he said, and would require us to permanently move out (or at least for a few weeks, if not longer).

I began frantically searching for houses and sent a few to Justine, who looked at a couple of apparent crapshacks later that afternoon.

The landlord obviously didn’t like the first electrician’s answer, so called in another. The second parroted the first, though advised we wouldn’t have to move out, as it would take “only” four days. We would, however, have to be present the whole time; and it would be messy. Why we needed to be present I’m not sure.

Wednesday evening, I ran an extension cable halfway through the house so I could power up my computer long enough to burn some unwatched TV shows to DVD. After watching said TV shows, I read some more of the new Harry Potter book in front of the heater, and then made my way to bed in a rather cold bedroom.

Thursday morning (this morning) and the landlord was still obviously unhappy with the verdict which would cost him a lot of money. Electrician number three arrived and proceeded to investigate. After a lot of umming, ahhing, and crawling under the house, they found the source of the problem.

Underneath our house is another fuseboard. Why? Again, I don’t know. Maybe it’s something to do with the ice cream van. After more banging and crashing, electrician number three managed to resolve the problem with the fuseboard under our house, and besides making a mess had our house all happy again.

So here I am now, typing on my computer the reasons for the website being unavailable.

THE END

It turns out that the ethernet bridge won’t work on WPA when connected to an Xbox, but it will on WEP. I could live with the worse security if it was reliable.

I attempted to watch a video on our Xbox with the wireless router in the computer room and bridge in the lounge. All worked well for around 10 minutes, and then the whole thing slowed to a crawl and eventually stopped. There are no wireless networks within range — I even walked around the garden with a laptop to see if anything was nearby — and all our other wireless stuff (even the 900MHz phone) turned off.

Power-cycling the router resolves it for another few minutes, and then it simply stops. I think that the blue cable lining the hallway is not as ugly as it used to be. The wireless is much uglier… inside. And it’s what’s inside that counts, right? I am going to attempt to return the stuff tomorrow. Fingers crossed but not hopeful.

Richard, Lesly and I spent around three hours sorting good from bad, what we’d keep, what could be thrown out and what we could give away (and chuck out if no one wanted it). Most of the stuff that could be given away (since it was no longer useful to Deakin) was quite old but there were a few things worth taking; Lesly took an old computer (P200 I think) for messing around with as well as an external SCSI CD burner which wasn’t worth using as is, but could be worth salvaging to make an external burner; Richard took a couple of cables and something else good I forget; I only took an Axis 2120 Network Camera which hadn’t worked for the past two years and should have been thrown out.

When I got the camera home, I realised I’d forgotten about looking for a few extra things that come along with it, such as the stand and outside casing; makes no difference if the unit doesn’t work, does it?

After downloading the manual for the camera, I realised there was extremely little I could actually do to fix the problem. The problem was that the unit would power up (well, that’s not a problem) but the ‘network’ light wouldn’t light up to indicate a successful connection to the network.

I did the only thing I could do, and that was to reset the firmware to factory settings. It worked! Sort of. The camera could now be seen on the network, and I was able to give it an IP address and configure it to my liking. However, when viewing the camera, it would simply stop after a minute or two of viewing. Closing the browser and loading up the page would sometimes resolve it, other times you had to turn it off and back on.

The website had firmware updates for the camera; I had to apply two to get the camera up to the current version (the version jumped about 35 versions) and since then, it’s performed beautifully. I have configured the camera so it’s externally available, but other than testing it’s not available yet. I will post when it’s positioned and available for viewing.

A good find, since it was just going to be thrown away!

At about 45% of the process, the disc was no longer readable. It looks fine to me, no scratches (I would be horrified if there were, my DVDs are in perfect condition), no dirt, no marks, no funny looking circles which can be a sign of impending doom; all is fine. However, my DVD-ROM and DVD-RW drives both stopped at around the same place.

I chose the “ignore and keep going” option when using my DVD-RW drive, and left it going for eight hours. The drive had been spinning the entire time, but had advanced maybe 100 sectors (not a lot, when there are ten if not hundreds of millions of sectors on a disc). Bad news, for sure.

Now, I haven’t had a chance to actually watch the movie yet, but I think it’s dead. If so, I am going to be quite annoyed, since I have had it for quite a few years now (it was a birthday present) and only watched it a handful of times. I wouldn’t even care if it was an issue with the extras, but since it seems to occur where the main movie is, I think I might have to have a word with Fox Home Entertainment.

Read the story here, and apply for a replacement here.

It turns out that the server’s hard disk was full; which was the cause of these problems. I’ve deleted a bunch of logfiles and other unneeded stuff to clear out about 300MB which should be more than enough for a few more months without me need to delete or change anything.

With the huge volume of users that visit I’m sure the site was sorely missed… Not.

I was unable to reproduce the circumstances under which it went crazy, it just seemed to do what it wanted, when it wanted. It doesn’t matter though, because I appear to have found a way to prevent the problem from occurring again… Or at least I hope so.

I set the counter to 697 posts. I can’t remember exactly what the number was; I know it was in the six-hundreds. If someone can remind me that’d be nice.

I thought it might be a good idea to double-check that the feed was still indeed present — it was. However, when I checked the feed with the Feed Validator, things fell into a little heap.

After mucking around for about 20 minutes, I realised that Dreamweaver, for some reason, was converting all the HTML-type tags to capitals. This is not something it should be doing, and causes a lot of problems since the tags for RSS feeds are case-sensitive. Once I’d realised Dreamweaver was at fault (and that’s the first time I’ve ever seen it do something like that), I used Notepad and manually transferred the file to the web server.

I have tested the feed on the Feed Validator and using an RSS agregator called SharpReader and it’s working properly now. Thank God for that.

Now that you’re all asleep, the link for the RSS feed is available here, as well as in the menu on the right. Thanks Richard for motivating me to fix it! One question though, why annable.nu and not annable.org?

The cause of the problem is thus, Optus saw fit to move me from one CMTS to another CMTS within the same node. Each CMTS has a specific pool of IP addresses. My Internet was not working this morning, so I restarted the router PC. Upon restarting, the computer had been assigned a different IP address (the first time it’s changed since we have had it installed).

The dynamic DNS service that I use was not automatically updated by my router for some reason (it’s supposed to be) which caused bludger.org to be pointing to the old IP address which is probably now someone else’s computer. Once I’d determined the problem it was easy to fix, and shouldn’t take too long to float around so you can see the site again.

If you can read this, it’s been fixed.

Update: Oh yeah, I have reduced the days being shown on the front page to three. That is, only the last three days with posts are shown by default. It used to be five (if you didn’t notice) but was getting a little long.

Anyway, so I’m driving to work. Actually, I got to work without incident, so I don’t really need to say anything about that.

Where was I? Oh yeah. So I get to work, and drive into the car park. I’ve bumped into one of those concrete stopper things, and I’m not parking quite straight in the spot (there’s very few spots taken at this time of the morning, at this time of the year), so I turn the wheel around to allow me to straighten up and I hear a funny little “clunk”. “It must be the power steering doing something funny,” I thought.

Nope. As I reverse I hear this strange, deep scraping sound. “That’s not good,” I think, imagining all the possible things that could have just broken, or fallen off my car, or vital things that are leaking. I’m also thinking about the many thousands of dollars it’s going to cost to replace said falling/breaking/leaking things.

I stopped the car and get out. Something looks strange, missing. It’s the concrete stopper thing. There’s not one in my parking spot. It’s sticking out from under my car. I take a closer look, and it appears to be stuck under the bash plate. It just so happens that I can’t try and reverse much more than 2-3 metres, as there’s another car parked behind mine, of all places. Why did I have to park there?

A guy who followed me into the car park has just gotten out of his car and looks over. We try to figure out a way around it but are stuck. We’re obviously not getting very far. I see someone I know and call him over. The other guy doesn’t know what to do, and pisses off — thanks a lot. Anyway, it turns out that the guy (Frank) notices the pin that holds the stopper thing in place (well, not this one) has somehow become lodged into my steering arm. Oh great.

Well, to make a long story short (I’m getting tired of this subject now), Frank holds onto the pin, and I reverse the car a few inches back. “It’s out!” he yells.

Phew.

We move the stopper thing back into place after much heaving — those bloody things are a lot heavier than they look — and I survey the damage to my car. I can’t see any. “There must be,” I think. “I’m never that lucky,” I add to myself.

Well, I checked the car twice more throughout the day, and there was no evidence of anything leaking from around that (or any other) spot, and the car got me home fine. Didn’t feel any different at all, and I’m sure I was being more perceptive than normal.

Not to mention that nothing else bad happened all day!

In other semi-interesting news, there is a Gamecube emulator which apparently actually works. Not that I have the games to try it.

It’s probably not going to be too hard to fix but we’ll see.

All I know is that the keyboard doesn’t work, and when you plug mine in it reboots (doesn’t with other keyboards but it still doesn’t work).

Actually, that would makes sense, as everything seems rather fast today here at work. Oh well, back to never updating the site. Try mike.bludger.org (which is currently in production) or even hijukal.bludger.org if you’re bored, although that site is never updated.

Mike out.