malvasia bianca

I now have FC3 installed on my home and both work computers. So I spent the morning today upgrading packages on one of my work computers. It took forever, though, because the web proxy that I have to go through at work kept on corrupting data, as far as I can tell. Once I found a mirror site inside of Sun’s network, it went smoothly, but until then, it was like pulling teeth.

That was my desktop machine at work. I’d already finished upgrading my work laptop on Monday; it was in a somewhat iffy state, because I’d done a botched partial install last week (not believing that my CD’s could really all be bad), so it had a bad mixture of packages. I thought it was all sorted out, though.

Today, however, something else seems to have gone wrong with my work laptop: rpm (the package manager) seg faults whenever I try to invoke it. Which is a really unpleasant situation to have to recover from: I can’t just, say, install a new package for it, because I’d have to use it to do the installation! I have no idea what could have caused this (it was working fine yesterday, after all); maybe the hard drive in that machine is going bad? (It seems to be generally falling apart – last Thursday, its display was behaving very strangely, too.) The botched upgrade and the seg faults might convince me to just reinstall the OS from scratch: I almost never use that machine, so there’s none of my personal stuff on it.

And then, when I got home and tried to import some more music into my iPod, Windows complained about a corrupted file. After a bit of poking around, it turned out that the corrupted file was on the iPod itself. (Windows could have told me that in the error message…) Fortunately, the error message told me what to do about it, so I fixed it, and everything seems to be proceeding smoothly. I would chalk this up to the costs of jogging while carrying around a hard drive, except that I haven’t gone jogging since the last time I imported some stuff, and it worked fine then.

So I seem to be a computer disease carrier right now. Maybe I’m giving off really powerful magnetic fields, or something…