Sunday, July 5, 2009
When I woke up, Patrick told me the computers weren't working. Indeed, very strange behavior: I launched Activity Monitor on Patrick's computer and the Activity Monitor icon appeared in the dock bouncing with the blinking dot as expected but nothing showed up in the animated icon at all (normally I would see the animated CPU chart). After about a minute the bouncing and blinking stopped and the icon remained but the CPU chart was empty and Activity Monitor did not load. The computer was restarted cold, so I knew something else was wrong. My computer exhibited similar strange behavior, and I knew then it was something related to the network. I touched one of the external hard drives and knew it was the problem. I turned it off and immediately my computer started responding as expected. The problematic drive was the one holding our CrashPlan backups, and somehow both computers had gotten hung up on a process requiring activity from the drive. Powered off my computer (Patrick's was already off), powered off all external drives, turned external drives on one by one, restarted both computers, now all is well. Spent all day working on Patrick's website. I updated Drupal core and third-party modules. I hadn't been happy with the Drupal template I had customized, so I dropped in the fluid 16 version of 960 grid system. Dropping it in was pretty easy, but getting the CSS to do what I wanted was really hard. I don't understand why they coded some elements like accordions as ids rather than classes. Lunch at home by myself: roast turkey sandwiches, tortilla chips, cherries. Weight training: superslow dumbbell press, superslow dumbbell fly. Cut my hair. Dinner at home with Patrick: noodle soup. Installed Loopt.