I had this great idea for laying down a new pair of servers as virtual servers running on some reasonably decent hardware. I’ve been fiddling nonstop for the last three weeks with this beast (ask Danna; she’s ready to disown me). I’ve learned a lot about how Virtual Server works. Enough to know that what I was trying to do would never work.

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Auctions rule. We buy things at auctions we would never think to spend money on normally. Like the huge basket of O Boy! Oberto snacks I bought a couple of years ago. This year among the receipts we found a week stay for eight at a villa called Villa Pantai in Bali, Indonesia. The villa sleeps eight and has a staff of six including two cooks, a masseuse, and a driver. After a quick sync up with our friends for logistics, we were on our way.

Getting There

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Five Nine's I'm not. In fact, I don't even think I'm one nine. This site, and several others, have been running nonstop on a pair of Shuttle PC's running 1.7Ghz Celeron processors for the last three years. Besides a couple of power supply failures I've never had to touch the Shuttles. They -- and Windows Server for that matter -- have been rock solid.

All of my web site content, and all of my shared files that reside behind my firewall are stored on external USB hard drives, however, and these have been anything but reliable. I get a controller error about once a week. It gets hot in my media room in the summer and even though the drives all have built-in fans I still burn through about two hard drives a summer.

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I have no self contol. I have a perfectly good Cingular 8525 phone that does everything I need. I've set it up just right so it has a very useful feature set for how I work.

But the iPhone is just so damn sexy.

I told myself: just one trip to the Apple store. If they had a phone in stock, I'd buy it. If not, I wouldn't sweat it and I wouldn't order it over the internet. They had one in stock. I bought it, and that's where the saga begins.

The phone really is a ground-breaking device. It's not the features. The iPhone will lose a feature war with most any recent generation Blackberry, Palm or Windows Mobile device. It's the way the features it does have are so seamlessly integrated. It's the way the touch screen responds to even the lightest stroke. It's the industrial design of the case and the exactness of the engineering that went into it.

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It was bound to happen. Cole turned one. We threw a party. There were many little kids. Longer sentences are beyond me. I need to recover from the shock.

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