gibbous.org

Brian talking to self.

-Welcome back Brian.
-Thank you. I appreciate it.
-Any chance you’ll update your site more often this time?
-Ah… probably not. Not likely. Very busy you see. Lots of things to do.
-I see. Such as…?
-Well, you know, there’s LotRO. There’s, ah, other stuff. Oh, I know, getting ready for my girl to arrive. That’s real. I mean, really real, if you know what I mean.
-Uh, sure…
-Anyway, I’ll make a post about that real soon.
-I’ll believe it when I see it.
-What’s that supposed to mean?

In other news that’s not even vaguely exciting, I’ve re-uploaded a few galleries.

1. Pictures with my sophomore #2 class in Wenzhou
2. A trip to the Milwaukee Zoo in 2002
3. A trip to Devil’s Lake in 2002

These are all rather old pictures.

It had been a while since I looked at my class photos from Wenzhou, and I found that I miss those students. As students, they were very good and teaching them was one of my high points when I was in Wenzhou. I hated taking the long, bumpy bus ride to the campus, and I didn’t like the campus very much, but the students were great. It is sort of the opposite situation in my current position, to some extent.

To my former students, I hope you are doing well. If I were guaranteed to have students like you, I’d love to teach in China again, but otherwise, I’m not so sure.

I’m not sure how it happened, but poor maintenance by yours truly was certainly the primary reason for the death of Gibbous.org. I think Gentoo, more than most Linux distributions, needs a watchful eye. Upgrading a huge batch of packages after months of negligence can be dangerous if not done carefully.

It wasn’t quite death as (almost) nothing was lost. A few emails were probably lost in the ether, and all MySQL databases are gone. That last is a pain, but could’ve been prevented had I realized the database files themselves resided in the /var directory. I was a little too liberal in cleaning out my old, dead, install of Gentoo before I re-installed it.

Email
Email now seems to work.

Galleries
All images are still on the server, but because the databases were deleted the galleries will need to be recreated. I hope to do this tomorrow for each gallery, and at the same time upgrade them to the newest version of Gallery 2.

Sorry everyone!

dedd Website and Forum
This is probably the worst hit from the entire fiasco. All the forum posts were stored in a MySQL database, which is now gone. Besides being more careful, I should backup everything periodically.