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Wouldn't you just know it? I wrestle all weekend with the new 9box, just like Jacob. Just like Jacob, it's a draw.
As myths go, Jacob having a sweaty wrestle with God - while just a bit gay - is a far better course of action than old Ezekiel, who had to eat a poo sandwich on a dare. (Seriously - what sick prick wrote crap like that?). How funny it must have been to be a teenage space traveller in Palestine in 700BC... "Sure, old smelly goat-herding dude... I'm The Lord. Whateverrrrr. OK< cool. If I'm God, I command you to, uhhhh, OK - mix shit with your bread and eat it." And poor old Ezekiel (Zeke the Shit Eater to his mates from that day forward) fell for it.
Zeke the Shit Eater... reminds me of a funny line "You spend your life working hard, raising your kids right, and paying your taxes and your bills, But you screw one goat, one time, and for the rest of your life you're Jim the Goat-F!cker"
But back to the 9box:
As it turns out, there was a software update which failed to install itself: the 9box followed French military doctrine and promptly surrendered. Well, it partially surrendered, but there was a single Ethernet port which collaborated, to which the Dell is connected and which permitted me to make my weekend post(s). But the WiFi function was not part of this Vichy-like splinter of the box, so the main RantBox remained unconnected to the internets tubes.
No amount of re-setting, unplugging or verbal abuse would get the 9box out of its funk, so I rang Tech Support and they had to reset it from their end. (That in itself raises an interesting question for the paranoid amongst you - if the ISP can delete and insert driver software into your router from a remote location despite the existence of a firewall, what ELSE can they do?).
But that's not all - not by half.
Once the 9box had been reset and had updated itself, I re-established the connection between the RantBox and the internets tubes and everyone lived happily ever after. NOT.
What in fact had happened is that the lightning strike had not only fried the old 9box, it had fried the RantBox's ethernet card and somehow had managed to deaded the USB WiFi dongle into the bargain. Since the Dell's ethernet is built in, and we only had one WiFi dongle, the RantBox (which runs under Ubuntu) was unable to run all the cron jobs necessary to build the skeleton of the OzRant.
Today I'm going to install Ubuntu in a new blank HDD on the Dell, so that I can have a synched copy of the databases and scripts that make up the Rants.
But on to things of relatively greater import...
The Strayan Market - in Briefs
A modest decline today - the All Ordinaries lost 0.41% to close at 4957.6. Size rotation helped spare the big-caps yet again, with the ASX20 losing 0.35% while the Small Ords lost 1.15%. The oddest result was the MidCaps which defied all other TopX indices and rose 0.57%, with 26 of the 50 components having a green day. It also helped that CSR - one of the biggest stocks in the midcaps - rose 6%.
The session high was just after 10:10 a.m., and took place at an All Ords level just above 5005; from there it was downhill for an hour, and sideways from there for five.more.hours... dull.
Full USRant tonight, and the full OzRant will be back tomorrow. For now, I have to go wreak some more havoc. Eleventy!
