h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Crunch, crunch, crunch.

Grind, crunch.

Whir, whir, whir, grind, crunch.

Crunch, whir, crunch, whir, crunch, grind.

Grind, grind, grind.

"Turn that blooming thing off!"

There starts the sounds that brought me from my slunber this morning. The primary hard drive in my server started making noises I normally associate with spinning an empty beer barrel on a safety metal floor. Not good.

Thankfully, when I moved up here a few months ago now my server suffered a corrupt registry (meaning I haven't a clue what went wrong, but windows stopped booting) so I installed a new (well old) hard drive that I had laying around and put the operating system on that, and left the large one in as the file store. So all the files I need to keep, aren't on the same hard drive as the operating system, which went whir, crunch, grind this morning. So, out with the old, in with a new (well, not so old) hard drive , format, install, update, slap on anti-virus server and firewall. That was seven hours to do. Seven hours to install an operating system and the minimum amount of security?? Seven hours?!?! It's no wonder I never get around to anything, I'm always fixing my bleeding computers! Well, at least the two desktops in use here are less than six months old. And the server is working now, hence me finally getting online. Still need to put an ftp server on it, a mail server, a web server, php and mysql. Oh joy, I guess that's tomorrow planned out for me! One thing that was on my server though were the websites I was working on. The phrase "smeg" comes to mind, except thankfully I use Dreamweaver. This is exactly the sort of situation where it's worth every penny you pay for it. Admitedly I didn't pay for it, a company I used to work for bought it and when they went bankrupt owing me a lot of money, I took it as part payment, on the bosses' instructions, I didn't nick it. Dreamweaver is set up on my machine, and I edit files locally, which means that I have a local copy on my machine. Each time I've got something fixed, or written something new, it uploads it to the server to give it a remote copy. I then use a fully fledge ftp thing to upload to the live servers. So, all I have to do when I've got the web server up and running on the server is hit upload on my local machine, and hey presto, everything's back.
I know there are other things that you can use, such as Putty, but this is nice, simple, and has a graphical interface.

So, that's that.

More CAMRA goodness, we got a large stationary order from HQ the other day, and I've been trying to organise for the committee to get together to go through it and decide what we're going to do with what we've currently got, and what we might want to order more of. Deities but that took some doing. And at the end of a week of cajouling and down right bullying, one guy can't make it as he's swanned off abroad for a couple of weeks, one lass can't make it as she's got a pub to run and we're not meeting there, two others can't make it as they're in Nodnol on the piff. So that leaves five of us, the chair, the sec (the missus), publicity (who can't stay long) me and the awkward one. And it's because of him we're meeting in the pub that we are, as he's got to play in the quiz team. How does he expect to go through the stationary with us and play in the quiz?!?! We'd be better off leaving him to the quiz and going to the pub where our treasurer has to work! Ah well. So I reckon I'm going to have to pop into the other pub afterwards to let her know what'd been decided. If we actually decide anything that is. Talking of which, I'd better go get everything packed and ready to take to this pub, one of the things about not owning a car is I walk everywhere, and carry everything I want to take. At least there's no chance of me driving after a few beers, but seeing as I'm still not working, there's little chance of the few beers.
One thing that has been decided (pretty much, we just need the rest of the committee to know about it and agree) is to send out a batch of "Publican Publicity Packs" with the next branch newsletter. Just an A4 envelope or something with a letter from the chairman introducing the branch and the committee, and what CAMRA is about, a couple of posters, a few leaflets, a holder for the magazine and for membership leaflets, plus contact details, who to get hold of for what reason. They'll only initially be going to the pubs that already agree to stock the magazine, so they're ones that know about us, but we need to get them more on our side. Rather than fighting them (guess who's been doing that, and no it's not me) we need to be working with them.
I also need to make sure we remember to sort out ordering the pub of the year certificates.

Not got any coding done as the sever's been an sod.