December 21, 2003

In Which Ardith Discusses Local Anesthesia And SCSI

Where to start?

Ah, yes. The wisdom teeth. To begin with, I'll never look at a hammer and chisel the same way again. And I didn't even get any nitrous oxide. I was very disappointed. Instead, they gave me sedatives until I was nearly asleep, but still awake enough to follow directions like "Open your mouth." Then the dentist proceeds to start giving me local anesthetic. I think I had about 6-8 shots in the end, but it's all a little blurry.

Enter hammer and chisel. I swear, that's what they used. Apparently my teeth had to be pried loose from a very comfortable spot. It's very weird to hear the pounding all through your head, and yet feel no pain. Having successfully removed the teeth, they put a couple of stitches where each one was, packed my mouth full of gauze, and sent me home with lots of ibuprofen.

Several days later, the most annoying thing is the stitches which won't be taken out until tomorrow.

I was most productive yesterday, however. My dad happened to come down while I was lying on the couch, thinking about taking a nap, and pointed out that it would probably be a good day to switch the harddrives in the server, since most of the kids were gone practicing their Christmas play. Me being logical, if nothing else, I realized he might have a point, and started tearing stuff down. Lessons learned:

1-- One of the four new SCSI drives doesn't like to spin up. For unexplainable reasons.
2 -- It always takes me about 3 hours to get LILO to boot on the new SCSI boot drive. The reasons for this are numerous.
3 -- One of these reasons is the simple fact that I have never figured out how to get the SCSI controller to boot from the cdrom.
4 -- Another reason is that 50% of the random linux boot floppies I pulled out didn't have SCSI drivers.
5 -- A further 25% weren't working at all.
6 -- The floppy drive wasn't working for awhile, until I figured out that the 2-inch adapter from the power cable to the floppy drive was shorting something out. Don't ask me how, it's just a simple extension of four wires.

Having finally got the new 45-Gig drive to boot, I proceeded to copy all the reams of virtually useless data over. It only took 3 hours longer than it was supposed to.

And then, of course, I sat down and watched The Fellowship of the Ring. Two Towers is slated for tonight, and I'll see Return of the King sometime on Tuesday. Finally.

Posted by Ardith at December 21, 2003 05:06 PM