November 15, 1999

Dear Diary: Consider me thoroughly whipped and converted to the Religion of Doing Frequent Backups of my Hard Disk Drive.

Honest, I have a great excuse for not updating the diary (or the site in general) recently. I came to work one day and around noon my computer's hard drive started crunching and I though, "Gee, that's odd, Cheshirecat [my computer's name] is much louder than normal." Then around a quarter to five it went WHOMP WHOMP WHOMP CRUNCH ... and then it decided now would be a good time to shut down. Yes, it's true. I lost my hard drive and had exactly zero backups. Yes, I deserve any "Well, that was dumb of you" remark. Sigh. Anyways, as a direct result of the crash I lost all of my un-dealt-with and archived email. So if you had sent me an email and I haven't responded yet, well, that's why.

So that happened on Wednesday, November 3. After going home and mourning that night, I came back to work on Thursday like normal, had a nice normal day (that included installing the replacement for my hard drive and reinstalling), then went home. Came in the house, took off my coat... my cell phone rang. My co-worker says to me, "Uh, Jabberwock [our main server] is tall screwed up. It keeps saying something like "drive seek timeout, retry failed.'" So I make him read off one of the errors to me ... second hard drive failure in less than 24 hours. At least I did have tape backups of the server. Lost less than 16 hours' data, mostly email. So that was good. Well, about as good as a hard drive crash gets. I mean, I had backups, so it was okay. It could have been much worse. Knock on wood. So let this be a lesson to you all... (a) never file all of your recipes to add to your web site "on a rainy day," and (b) get a tape drive and use it. Often.

OK! So last time I updated the diary we still hadn't moved yet. We're moved now. :-) We've even done the laundry several times. How's that for being firmly entrenched in a house? We bought a new bed from IKEA, which is actually a pretty nice bed, and the cats can both sit on it at once without fighting (much). We also pulled some new phone wiring up through the second floor because what was there, was crap, and we needed to get our ISDN run upstairs to our computer room. Did I mention I forgot exactly how much 28.8 modem connections with bad house wiring suck? Oh, they suck mightily. I missed our ISDN. So here we are in our new house with stuff (mostly) unpacked and working normally...

...And I still haven't made soap yet. This is because we moved, we unpacked, I flew to Seattle, and I just got back. While I was in Seattle, though, I did get a chance to go to the Olympia (WA) Soaper's Gathering and meet some West Coast soapers, notably Lydia of EarthSong Naturals and Anne-Marie of "Bramble Berry, also J'son from the SoapPot list. So that means I've been to a gathering on each coast this year. Not too shabby for someone "stuck in the middle" here in Illinois. :) It was pretty cool at the gathering; I came in late, but I did get to see Anne-Marie demonstrating embedding M&P and talking about color bleeds, which was good information to have. Lydia also demonstrated using alkanet to get purple coloring in CP, naturally. Now that was pretty neat. I have got to get my hands on some of that stuff.

So in the new house, I have a whole soaping room to myself. It has six built-in cabinets, which is pretty cool. Actually, really cool. The only thing is that I don't have all the shelf space for curing my soaps that I used to have at the old apartment, so I have to figure something out for that. It's got good overhead lighting, so I'm hoping that it will work out really well for photographing different aspects of soapmaking. So let me know if you have any ideas. I do want to get a pictoral process of HP and various M&P techniques. So if you have any suggestions for pictures, let me know via email to viv@ziggurat.org.

I made some M&P tonight. Nothing really special, just wanted to try out the new red/blue mica I got from Bramble Berry before I went to Seattle. So I melted down a pound of clear M&P, added about 10ml of Dewberry FO, about the same amount of rosehip oil, and probably .50cc of the red/blue mica, and poured into Milky Way Celtic Square and Ornament molds. It smells pretty good. It turned out that the soaps look baby pink, I didn't add enough mica to get a real shimmer, except if you look on the bottom of the soap you can kind of tell. I think I'll try using that mica in cp and see if it holds up at all.