September 2006 Archives

Back in August Jill supported me in going with a group from church down to Biloxi, MS on a missions trip for a week. We had a great group of folks -- young and old, guys and girls -- and we tackled some tough tasks for a week. I say there were tough, but they weren't -- the Lord gave us the strength to do the job we had to do and He fed us and sheltered us better than the people we were there serving.

The place we were is called Hope City and it is supported by the HCRN -- Hope Crisis Response Network. A week after we were there President Bush came down and awarded one of the volunteer leaders we served with the President's Volunteer Service Award. What a great honor!

The folks we served were all great people and I hope that they were lifted up by the Holy Spirit through our deeds and words. I added some pictures to the albums part of the site that show some of those fine folks.

I thought I would chronicle some weirdness that happened with one of the G5's we have at work. A graphic artist left the machine to download and install the latest update (Security Update 2006-005, iTunes 7.0.1) last night and when she got to work this morning clicked the restart button the machine restarted but no application would open! It would ask the user to authenticate and then throw an error. Basically, Finder was the only application that worked -- which actually made it nice to be able to back things up. Well, System Preferences worked too so we went in and determined that the two user accounts on the machine (10.3) were now just Standard acounts. There was no longer any Adminitrator account and the users had lost priviledges to nearly everything useful.

First thing we did was connect an external drive and copy over all the files that were probably already on the most recent backup but it's better to be safe... Then we just attempted to do a reinstall using the 10.3 install discs we have here at the office -- booting from the CD would panic the machine everytime, which I don't understand. So, we decided to try and boot the install CD from a different (functioning) G5 and install the OS via Firewire Target Mode... and the installation CD locked up the other G5 too. I switched to another copy of the install CD and it locked up too... so I figure the bad G5 is jinxed! I am, however, able to wipe the drive just in case there was something fishy going on with it, but it had no positive effect as we tried another time on the install CD and got the same locking issue.

On to greener pastures -- I decided to clone the drive using CCC and -- surprise -- it works like a dream. Three cheers for Firewire and Bombich Software.

So little time to post anything here these days, but with some good reason. We moved a couple of months ago and while life has certainly changed for the better I would confidently say that we are just now starting to get settled in to the place. Which isn't to say that my TODO list is complete! But it is getting there... right, Honey?

So, to make up for our being-busy, here is an image of the front steps to our new home. May it be a place whose owners are as inviting as the walk up to the door.