Dave Mancuso dot Com

I missed last night’s weblog through no desire of my own. My laptop decided to take a vacation on me and crashed with a blinking question mark on restart.

Luckily, it was my Mac laptop that died, not my PC. Since it was my Mac that hosed itself, I was able to hook it up to another Mac in Target Disk Mode using the Firewire port (IEEE 1394 to you PC types). On the other Mac, I could then see the laptop’s hard drive. Disk First Aid and Norton both choked on the drive, though–they couldn’t fix it.

Since I could see the drive I figured that I could at least copy my info off. The drive was physically OK; it was the directory structure that was corrupted. But where could I find a 60 GB hard drive to back up my data too? I didn’t have one.

I did, however, have a brand new Macintosh XServe, a Unix server with 360 GB of space. Within three minutes I had my laptop connected to the XServe and I was using the Disc Copy program to back up.

Several hours later, I came back to the office and started the restore. I blew away the bad hard drive, reformatted it, and used Carbon Copy Cloner to put everything back on my laptop. A few updates later, I had my laptop back (and I’m writing this post on it now).

An interesting point: I had access to a big hard drive to back up my stuff, but the rest of the tools are freely available for Macs. If I had this happen to my PC, I’d be up the creek without a paddle. There’s no way I’d be back up with a fully functional machine and a clean install within a day. And I can tell you from experience that my Macs have much fewer problems than my PCs. I like both, and I use both, but if I had to choose one, I think my choice would be pretty clear.

Since it was so easy to move our Mammoth Concepts website, it seemed to be a good time to move the Digital Perspective website onto its own server. The name “Digital Perspective” doesn’t really roll off the tongue as a web address, though, so I chose a name that rolls off the tongue (slightly) better: Split Focus. In a day or two, you can find me at the new Split Focus website (http://www.splitfocus.org).

Besides, if you think about it, “split focus” is a theme that fits me perfectly.

The other day I mentioned the Beaver Avenue Beggars, a band I used to listen to up in State College. I failed to mention, however, one of the best and most popular music groups that Penn State has ever produced–Cartoon. They’ve been broken up for almost twenty years and yet they still get back together to play, mostly at Penn State’s Arts Festival in July. I’m partial to them because I like acoustic rock, but apparently a lot of other people are partial to them as well.

I remember visiting Elaine Zaleski (now Elaine McCarty) at Penn State in 1983 and going into a record store where she bought an album called Native State by Cartoon. I didn’t listen to the album, but the group stuck in my mind. Six years later, I had the chance to listen to a Cartoon reunion concert at the Arts Festival, and I loved it. I bought a great two-album Cartoon cassette that I literally wore out a few years later. When CD burners came on the scene, I thought about trying to transfer the tape to CD, but I never had all the right pieces to digitize the songs.

Later, though, the Internet saved the day. A Google search for the heck of it one day turned up this Cartoon website. Better yet, the website had CDs for sale of the songs I wanted. I bought both CDs and had my Cartoon fix again. Now I see on the website that they have a third CD for sale. It’s on my list to get in the next few weeks.

Cartoon rocks.

I took Drew up to Fox’s Market in Middletown earlier tonight, and we drove back along the river (it’s the back way from Middletown to my house, down Route 441). As we drove by the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant I pointed it out to Drew. He’d seen it before, but he’s so little he forgets. This time, thought, he asked a lot of questions about it. I tried to answer them as best I could. Do you know that the whole near-accident was compounded by human error? Back in 1979, the computers sensed a problem and began to cool things down immediately. A human operator misread the alert and shut off the cooling. That’s what caused the plant to move to near-meltdown phase. The phone lines in the area were so jammed that no one could get in touch with the control room to tell them to turn the cooling system back on. Finally, they broke through and the operators set everything back properly again. Within a day, the area was out of danger.

I didn’t tell Drew all this, but he seemed to be happy with the answers I gave him. I had to explain why two of the towers smoked and two didn’t (they never restarted the bad reactor–it will be fully dismantled eventually). The funny thing was looking at the houses on the left as we passed the towers on the right. People live literally across the street from TMI. And life goes on.

My house is about six miles from TMI. My school district (my workplace) borders TMI. We have comprehensive plans for an event at TMI that are continually refined. We’ve discussed them in the last few months, and while I don’t feel I can speak about our contingencies, I can say that the leadership of the school district has really planned for almost any eventuality, including instant and complete evacuation of the district. We live and work a stone’s throw from the infamous TMI, and we plan for the possible nightmare scenarios, and then we go back to our daily routine. It’s a bit strange, but most days we don’t even think about it. The possibility is remote, and a situation will probably never happen again, and we’ve made whatever precautions we can, and we all have lives to lead, and frankly life in Etown is pretty good.

And life goes on.

I really hosed the new server tonight for a bit (at least for this weblog directory–not for the main site). I was fooling around with subdomains and access to the weblog was blocked off. I had to go into the .htaccess file to bring the site back.

But hey, that’s how you learn.

The Internet is great for looking up information on just about anything, including old rock bands you used to see. Denise and I used to listen to a great band in State College called the Beaver Avenue Beggars. They played at the Phyrst for a while on Friday nights in the 1989-1991 timeframe, and we used to go up the Penn State on the weekends and catch them when we got into town.

I wondered where they were now, or if they even had a CD that I could get, so I did a Google search and found this webpage online. No CDs, but at least it had some detail about the band. This page detailed an earlier incarnation of the band, Trinity1296 (I think the 1296 represented the number of strings on their guitars, 12 and 6–I don’t know what the 9 was for). They later hooked up with Randy Hughes from Cartoon and called themselves Trinitoonity, but my favorite incarnation of their sound was the Beaver Avenue Beggars.

I’ve resisted writing the war stories down because they’ll take so long to write, and there are so many of them–but they demand to be told. Here’s a quick one to seed the garden.

In fall of 1984, my parents were in the process of moving from Philly to Canton, Ohio. They had plans to fly to Canton on a particular weekend, and my brother Joe approached me about having a party at the house while they were gone. I thought about it, but I just didn’t think it was a great idea. I told Joe “OK–if you had a party here, you’d have to be quiet. I mean really quiet. No one can know even in the neighborhood that you’re having a party.”

Joe actually decided he could handle that, and told me it was no problem, and went off to make preparations. Me, I worried. A lot.

The night of the party, I worked my shift at Denny’s (I was a waiter then) and after doing my sidework, drove home. As I pulled into the driveway, the house was dark and silent. I guessed that things didn’t work out for the party, or Joe had had second thoughts. I unlocked the front door and walked in. And tripped over something on the floor.

As my eyes struggled to adjust to the darkness, I heard whisperings and mumblings in the dark. “Who is it?” “Shhhh!” “What’s going on?” “Hey, it’s OK–it’s Dave.” I began to make out shapes on the floor. On the couch. On the stairs. In fact, just about everywhere. Joe had been true to his word, and I was witness to the most laid back, quietest “party” I’ve ever seen. The next thing I knew, a dark form worked its way up to me, and said in my brother’s whispering voice “Hey Dave! Whaddya think? I kept it quiet just like we talked about!”

To this day it still weirds me out–in a funny, amazing kind of way. I mean, they even parked three blocks away to avoid detection. Talk about dedication to a cause…

Well, it looks like we’ve successfully moved our domain over to our new hosting company, Citadelhost. I think the DNS changes have propagated across the Internet, so www.mammothconcepts.com points to the new hosting server now instead of the old one. I republished this weblog to the new server–Radio choked a few times generating a year’s worth of weblog, but it made it eventually. Welcome to our new home!

The ride to day care this morning was accompanied by the full seven minute singalong rendition of the popular Beatles hit Hey Drew, replete with my 3 year old’s giggles (I think Drew fully believes it’s Hey Drew–I’ve “fooled” him completely).

Alyssa, however, spent the drive with her hands over her ears, scowling because Daddy wouldn’t let her spend the extra 45 minutes she apparently needed to find the “other jacket” (of questionable existence, if you ask me). She’s “very angry” at Daddy (and Daddy laughing because she’s so cute didn’t help, either).

I’m sure I’ll pay for all this in twenty years when the kids are in therapy reliving all my evils as a parent…

A mixed metaphor I use sometimes just for fun:

Well, the foot’s really in the other mouth now, isn’t it?