Kevin's Weblog

The crashes are back. They started slowly last week and have worked up to 4 or 5 a day this week. I guess I was too quick to blame Sailing Clicker, although I suspect that it was tickling something in the kernel. Briefly this morning, I thought that somehow something in fetchmail was to blame. My fetches had been failing since last Tuesday when my password got expired. After I corrected that, I was crash-free for the rest of the day, but after I got home I got several more.

At this point I’ve pretty much concluded that there is just something wrong with the image they set up for the pilot program at work, and a reinstall from scratch is the only way to save my sanity. I do have some evidence that they tinkered with things they probably shouldn’t have, as various programs I’ve attempted to compile have failed because they couldn’t find things like libmalloc. So, this evening I did a full backup. Tomorrow, I’ll start in on the install.

I’m not much of a sports fan, but I haven’t been able to avoid coverage of the Ron Artest controversy. I just had to wonder, is there any other profession where you could, after any provocation, dive into a crowd and start a fight by hitting one of your customers, and not expect to be fired? I guess I just don’t have much sympathy for these guys claiming that their suspensions are too harsh.

(I guess perhaps movie stars might also enjoy this level of privilege.)