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Today I learned that besides showing a few grey hairs, there may be other indicators that the years are creeping up on me. I had confidently opened my server's computer case with the intention to add a newly bought SATA hard disk drive to the system. With a gleam of triumph in the eye I connected the drive to the motherboard, using the extra SATA cable that I had remembered to buy along with the drive (hey, I know that the age of IDE has passed, even if some dinosaurs don't!). Then the revealing moment, when I wanted to connect the drive's power and realized that the expected Molex connector was not there...

The following story is probably not very interesting to anyone out there, but it serves as a reminder (at least to myself) why backups are so important. Today I was lucky enough to spot disaster creeping up on me in time, but tomorrow I might be too late...

The whole thing started when my wife told me that "there are a lot of funny error messages on our homepage". "Error messages on our homepage, what do you mean?" I replied, and then pointed my browser at the website to see for myself. This is what I saw:

Surfing the web sometimes uncovers gems like this one. Warning: You will not be thrilled unless you are an Infocom enthusiast :-)

Addendum: This is also a good Infocom resource.

Comments are now enabled on the entire site. To ward off spam bots, anonymous visitors (i.e. guests that are not logged in) must enter a CAPTCHA, though. The CAPTCHA system is currently set to display ASCII art (which is fun :-), but this will probably change in the future.

Although the typical Mac user, living in the Aqua land of blissful ignorance, usually does not care about environment variables and other such "strange" beasts, it may sometimes become unavoidable having to deal with this stuff from the ninth hell of command line wickedness.

My moment of truth came when I wanted to run the Gimp (the official Mac port can be downloaded from here) in a different language (English) than the default language of my Mac OS X installation (German). For this I had to run Gimp.app using the environment variable LANG set to the value en.

This afternoon I have been busy whipping up a topic hierarchy and tagging all the old stories and articles on this website. Hopefully I will also find the time to add some nice icons.

I recently upgraded my site to Drupal 6. Unfortunately, I had to abandon my beloved Aqua theme in the process because nobody had ever bothered to rewrite the theme for Drupal 6, and I had not an inkling of how to do it myself.

For the moment, the Sky theme serves as a replacement. Let's see how it stands the trial period...

Hilarious, and yet so true, a must read for any serious procrastinator: http://www.structuredprocrastination.com/.

I am going to look over the priorities of my TODO list right away! I should probably make "write captions for old vacation pictures" the top-priority task, whereas "backup my data" needs to be mercilessly demoted to priority 9 :-)

I just found out that besides me and the Alice in Wonderland character there is another Herzbube. Now there are three of us :-)

Today I experienced a powerful demonstration of the influence that Google has over their user's look on the world.