One of *those* days! Ever been there?

Have you ever had one of *THOSE* days? You know, one that just seems to go on and on and on and…..  well you get the idea.  That’s my day er um week.

I like to write about the good stuff, or if I do write about the not so pleasant, annoying, or just bad stuff I try to find the silver lining or a least throw in some humor.  Not sure if anyone saw how my evening went on Friday in my Parking-spot Predicament Post on my Family: Graner Style Page but that’s a good start on seeing the what I mean by my “week”.

I did a clean install of Lucid on my Dell 1330 last week.  I have to tell you I am loving it.  I had one issue with my mouse hanging –  I could move the mouse see the cursor but clicking on anything did nothing, so I would have to reboot. Any who pgraner heard my not so pleasant remarks about how this was happening over 20 times a day since I installed Lucid, and asked me, “What are you talking about? Why are doing that [rebooting]?” So I showed him.  He mentioned it to his team because they had heard of this error but had not been able to reproduce it.  I could a gizillion times a day – I guess I am just talented like that (scarcasim).  Andy Whitcroft was kind enough to ping me on IRC and asked me about it.  He asked me to boot the computer in “i915.powersave=0” mode and see what happens.  I did and guess what. I didn’t have that issue anymore!

I even learned how to file a bug. Since I did not have the nice little thingy that shows up in the panel that told me I had a crash report I couldn’t use “apport” to collect what I needed. (and it seems that everytime I do use apport to file a bug it tells me I can’t because some package somewhere is not up to date even if I just updated minutes before) Andy asked me to file a bug about my issue.  It pained me to say I don’t know how to file a bug any other way.  So Andy, Tim Gardner, and Jeremy Foshee all gave me pointers on how to file the bug.  So I went to bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+filebug.  The link that Tim had given me took me to the tutorial on how to file a bug on the ubuntu.com site.  However it is a good place to start if you are new to filing bugs like me  – 🙂

Once I filed the bug and it was given a bug report number I could then go back to a terminal window (yeah yeah yeah  – I am learning to use the command line but the cool thing is you don’t have to to file bugs, but I don’t know much about all that as I don’t file bugs much and everytime I do it’s a bit painful – most of the time)  Any way – back to my bug.  So once I had a bug report/bug number I could bring up a term window and using the command line I could the use  – apport-collect .  Once I ran this it collected the information for that bug, it asked me a bunch of questions and bam – I was able to include other infomation that Andy and those folks could use to fix the problem.  I was so excited that I learned how to do that without asking pgraner for help. I did however notice two things in the questions boxes one of the questions was “Can you reproduce this bug?” or something like that and the answers were “yes” and “no”.  Well it was no when I was was booting in the i915.powersave=0 mode, but yes if I set it back the way it was.  hmm I wanted a “maybe” box with an area to write that into :-).  Also when asked how often was this happening it listed “once a day” and there was no “several times a day” option.  Could have used that option as well.  However, it was a pretty enjoyable experience filing a bug.  I might have to do some more of that.  Considering tomorrow is a bug day for gwibber and I love gwibber I might just have to help out tomorrow 🙂 (More on that later)

You would think all would be right with the world now woudn’t you?  Computer is hanging any more and I now know how to file a bug, I’m running Lucid and what could be better :-/ well I am so glad you asked!

I got up this morning only to find my harddrive on my Dell 1330 died.  I don’t mean it was hanging, I don’t mean the data was borked, I mean will not even boot, won’t even mount a liveUSB stick.  Notta, nothing, nowhow – 🙁   It was one of those mornings where I wanted to just say, “I quit!”  I was not a happy camper at all.  Luckily I still have my MacBook Air and it has Lucid on it.  I just needed to get to my backed up info on the server.  It was still a but painful and I am still missing a couple days worth of stuff since the last time I backed up was about 4 days ago.  *sigh* – but all in all not too bad.  So I will just backup my stuff at night before I go to bed and hopefully this won’t happen ever again.  🙂

Not sure I have a silver lining to all this except, I have learned to laugh with my daughter (parking spot post) in times of stress, I learned to file a bug, and I am getting pretty good at ssh’ing into the server to find my stuff, as well as installing a computer and putting it back to the way I like relatively quickly.

My TODO list is now screaming my name, but I’ll get to that in a few.   I feel much better now 🙂  more later…