I did a presentation on Linux Traffic Control last night to the local LUG. I found OpenOffice.org’s Impress to be most effective for presentations. The nice digital projector was helpful, too.

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Power has been restored in the neighborhood as of 4 o’clock this afternoon. Finally able to access the Internet, I check various news sites to see what has been going on. I am saddened to learn of Punta Gorda’s fate which it suffered at Zero Hour yesterday. Fortunately, the death toll has not been that high. There were apparently injuries in the region where the hurricane made landfall, though.

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Finally, all is quiet. Outside, there is only silence. No light. No sound. No rain. It’s as if the Earth itself is holding its breath.

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Outside, it is still quite gusty. The sky is often filled with the bluish flashes of electrical transforms giving up the ghost. It’s as bright as lightning itself on a dark night. The cellular network and POTS seems to be intact, for now.

Presently it’s raining quite hard, with the howling of the wind and the rustling of the bushes outside impossible to ignore. The lights dim. Around 9:30, power fails entirely. It does not come back. A portable radio provides news. I learn of winds in excess of 100 mph at Orlando International Airport. As the dark night progresses, news of destruction is continuous.

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Apparently Charley has finally made landfall very near Port Charlotte. It should reach Orlando by ten o’clock this evening. Expected winds are up to 80MPH. It’s starting to seriously pour outside now.

The latest reports are suggesting hurricane Charley’s path will take it very near Orlando. Looks like I picked the perfect weekend destination after all. It’s now nearly three hours to zero hour. Presently the sky has grown darker from it’s original light grey at the time of my arrivial around one o’clock this afternoon. A moderate down pour has begun, but only briefly before retreating back into the clouds above.

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I stopped at the Gainesville Kargaroo gas station on 34th street for a fill up. They were out of regular and mid-grade. I parked and wandered inside to grab something for breakfast, a hotdog and 32oz soda, as per usual. The line was lengthy at the register. After a few moments of waiting, some woman from a local radio station came in and barked for the manager, then accused the employees of price gouging after successfully pumping a gallon of regular gas. The employees explained that they’re not supposed to sell gasoline when the tanks are that low, as it’s potentially unsafe for vehicles. The woman wouldn’t hear of it, barked something about going back to the radio station, and left. The people in line were annoyed.

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What’s a guy to do with a spare 3Ware Escalade 6200 and a pair of identical 30GB Seagate hard drives? Why, RAID 1 a mail server, of course. I decided it was time to upgrade my parent’s Debian GNU/Linux mail server from a single 6GB Seagate hard disk to an actual RAID 1 setup to protect against a possible single disk failure. With so much extra space, at some point I might setup Samba and it’ll be used as a file store as well. Unfortunately Windows XP Home doesn’t like to be in Active Directory domains by default, so that kind of setup might require a little doing. One thing at a time, though. Not sure what to do with the 33.6 Winmodem or Pro Audio Spectrum PAS 16 I retrieved from the box.

I was in the market for a portable MP3 player recently. The cheapest iPod or Rio Karma I could find was hundreds more than I wanted to spend, even refurbished. Fortunately, someone suggested I look at CD based portable players. It had not occurred to me, as I own no CDs of my own, but it turned out to be an excellent suggestion.

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I hunted around and found all the old, potentially working equipment I had left that I had no need of. I ended up with four two ATX cases and two Baby AT cases, an old 486SX mainboard, a P166 mainboard, a couple old hard disks I booted and wipped clean, some old RAM, a bunch of miscellaneous pieces and parts, a 10Mbps half duplex HUB, and a few other oddities.

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I finally cleaned up all my old computer stuff. All told I have four junk cases, two old Baby AT mainboards, a 486 SX mainboard, and a couple old hard drives. Everything else I found was still usable enough to keep. The aforementioned items might be of value to someone else, so I’m donating them to a local computer recycling place. I found an old 14″ monitor and an old RCA TV, both broken, which I took to Office Depot for recycling, taking advantage of their current nationwide recycling program.

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Quicken didn’t want to do what I needed, which was to total all my expenses by place of origin for the year to date. Quicken only sorts on category, but I long since gave up keeping Quicken up to date since I don’t want to message around with Web access to fetch my expenses from multiple places.

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