April 29, 2001--
It has been one week exactly since the latest big computer crash. Isn't it amazing how one little sector of one's hard drive, located at Cylinder 22, Head 97 Section 1 (otherwise known as Cluster 44719), if it fails can bring an entire computer system to its knees. It took me over six hours to recover from that failure, and all of the rest of the week to get Internet access back on line. Comcast hurled their entire arsenal at the problem in over three hours of problem solving attempts, on April 23, 26 and 28. Finally, last night after last gasp experimentation, Sherry, the latest Comcast tech rep I dealt with, had me remove everything from my Network properties card. Everything!
I cleaned out the Microsoft Family Logon, the Dialup Adapter, the Network card adapter, and the TCP/IP settings that were bound to them. And upon a re-boot, the amazing happened. I had connection again! After such long litany of failure my heart jumped to my throat. It was thrilling. So, we are back on line.
The machine is now running well. I have all the programs back that I (currently) want to use. (One thing about frequent computer crashes is that you tend to clean out the little or unused programs that can tend to clog your system and bog down system resources. So now I can forget about putting those back on the machine and look for new ones.)
The newest thing this week that I'm very excited about is the messageboard I put on the web site [no longer used JJS 9/21/03]. Ikonboard has a free application that is pretty easy to set up and use. It took me probably just over and hour to get it installed and configured. Not too bad for someone who knows no PHP or Perl. But then, none of those things are required for you to understand to set it up. You do have to telnet into your web host and make sure the permissions are set on files correctly. But that's easy to do; I mean even I learned how. And I tweaked the colors a bit to make the board match my site's color scheme; and will leave it alone for now, and just wait for the membership to grow.
I know it will start slowly. It isn't easy for some people to jump into the public lime light, though I've never known any of the Schneider kids to have any pause in that area. Well few of them, anyway.
And I am hoping that the posting of messages will eventually grow fast and furious. I should say that I do recognize the possibility that some may not see the Schneider Forum as a useful tool to communicate and enjoy the robust exchange of ideas. And if that becomes the case so be it. That's OK with me. With all of us kids spread out across the continent and with few opportunities to visit face to face, this forum does have the potential to enhance the level of communication that email just begins to bridge. So far a couple of us have been having fun with it. After all it has been up only since Thursday. But to all who read this, family or not, come on over and read and participate. See The Forum links under Site Navigation.