Yes, I know that I have not posted anything for a spell and that this site was actually down for a while (we'll just call it "unscheduled system maintenance," mmmKay?).
It seems I had a bit of an "issue" with the 30-something year-old plumbing at the homestead on Easter Sunday that resulted in having to deal with a stinky, soggy mess in my basement office on Easter++. Of course, my PC lab is located in there, so I had to dismantle the whole nine yards in order to make room for the plumbing repairs and to protect the electronics from the dust that would get generated when they jack-hammered out the concrete floor to get at the offending drain-pipe. Since I self-host my blog (because I don't like to play by the COC rules on the free places and I am too cheap to pay for a hosting service), it went down as soon as I took my domain controller and web server offline. Sorry, but it was all I could do to find a place to rig up the cable modem and wireless router so we wouldn't have to be totally off the net for the duration.
The plumbing repairs were completed by 3/27, but since my built-in PC workstation also had to be removed to provide room to work on the pipe, I no longer had any place to reinstall the PC gear until I could rebuild a new one. So my spare time for the next week was consumed by designing, creating, installing, and finishing a new workstation for the lab (and dusting off all my old hippie-gypsy-carpenter skills). I decided to take the time to do some aesthetic upgrades this time, and put some extra thought into things like providing better cable management, task lighting, power management, and storage solutions, so it took me a bit longer to get completed than I'd have liked. It was worth the extra effort though, and I am pretty happy with the way my new workstation turned out (it even got the seal of approval from the hunny bunny), but my work is far from finished in the lab - I still need to deal with the floors, but bare concrete is still a lot better than the rank carpeting that was previously installed in this room. But, I guess the good news is that I was finally able to get my servers back up and running last weekend and the prilliman.com domain is once again in a fully operational state.
The even better news is that my good neighbor State Farm cut me a check that was more than big enough to cover the plumbing repair, rebuild the workstation, and replace all of the carpet in the entire basement with a surface that won't get ruined if it ever does get a little wet down there in the future. I am really amazed at how generous they were when they came to assess the damages. I'm thinking the fact that Elvis followed the claims adjuster everywhere he went may have had something to do with it. You probably don't want to piss off a policy holder by denying claims when there's a 100 pound dog staring you down...