Well, I feel foolish. For the past few days I've been blogging. Faithfully. But I couldn't get anything to publish. Sure, it would post. Those posts just weren't showing up on my public weblog. I cursed Radio. I thought about changing to Moveable Type. I considered giving up blogging. I wondered if I would ever publish again.

Okay, so by know you know that I figured out the problem. And it turns out that it's "Operator Head Space". The term we used at ITT for user error. Let me digress.

Sunday night, after driving to Cedar City via Price (at least a two hour detour) I settled in my hotel room and proceeded to log onto the network. First Entourage, my mail program, shut down unexpectedly. Then iTunes went south. I restarted Entourage and it failed again. This has happened in the past and was solved by the classic troubleshooting method, the reboot.

Only this time my powerbook didn't start up again. I got through the screen with the half eaten apple and the spinning whirlygig. From that point everything goes white, then blue and then the login screen appears. Big problem, The apple goes away and the white screen of death appears. No blue screen. I tried several more times and nothing. I waited. That didn't work. I shut it down and tried to sleep. At about 3:00 AM I tried again. Same result. I knew I was in Mac territory, so I didn't panic. But my destination was contained in an e-mail message on that hard drive and so it took me a few minutes to find the venue.

I tracked down some Mac technicians early Monday morning. They tried everything. I learned some things about my Mac, like where to locate the memory and how to find the reset button. Nothing worked. So I found Jack Erickson, SEDC and he gave me a set of OS X discs. I fired up the powerbook, inserted the first disc and held down the C key. It seemed like the same old problem. The whrillygig spun for what seemed like way too long.

Finally, a new screen popped up. I reloaded the operating system. Re-downloaded the 10.2.6 update. Restarted the box and, wonder of wonders, it worked. I thought everything was just great. I proceeded to immediately post a message. I didn't think much about what happened because I was busy. Every now and then I did feel a great wave of relief knowing that my powerbook was working. I backed up everything I could think of later that day.

All of this brings me to today. Well, really yesterday. Jerry Matson has been upgrading our wireless network for the past week. Yesterday I had trouble logging on. So I took my powerbook to Jerry and he installed all the new software, set up an account, and couldn't get it to work. We spent an hour or so without any luck. Jerry said he would help me later because he was stumped.

I checked back with Jerry today. He said that the one thing we should try was to reset the date. He'd gotten information that this was a problem in other installations. I looked at the date and sure enough it was off. Way off. Like April, 1976 off. So I reset the date and viola, it worked. I was on the network.

So, finally tonight I had a chance to delve into my problems with radio. I looked through the documentation and went to the preferences. And I noticed a folder titled "1976". It was right above the "2003" folder.

Let's see, 1976? Where had I seen that date recently? Well, it didn't take me that long to figure it out. I immediately realized what had happened. My Monday through Thursday posts had published in my 1976 folder. Or, as Kay put it, I've become a time traveller. It wasn't that much fun.

The big problem now is that I've really messed up my blog and don't know how to correct it. So I've zeroed out the previous posts with a testing, testing, one, two, three pattern. I'm going to see what is required to get rid of all the junk. Until then my blog is going to be messed up. Such is life. What a stupid I am.........
7:28:37 PM    comment []