Back online

So, uh, I messed up. Around 3 weeks ago, I was supposed to be moving my servers to a new place. The problem – it had no internet. I was hoping to resolve it over a couple days, and therefore brought them over without a second thought. A surprise awaited me.

I assumed we just had an expired contract with the Internet Service Provider. But what we actually had was a dead cable. I suspect it was damaged when we had some of the wall-mounted furniture installed – though maybe it was something else. Whatever the cause, we had half of the cable short-circuiting. Luckily, you can re-wire a gigabit cable down to a 100mbps one with only around half of it intact. That’s a disapponting speed in our age, but better than nothing – especially when you’re a student short on time. After that, another week was lost because for some unknown reason our ISP needs you to sign documents and send a formal email just to re-connect the internet and purchase a static IP.

Well, it’s all over now. This site is up, my Git server is up, and I can listen to Impostor Factory’s soundtrack on repeat again. Nature is healing.

What I’ve been doing in the meantime:

Tech stuff

I went back to GitHub and set up mirrors for my most common repositories. For example, the one I use for studying, which contains all my notes and code. As much as I’d like to avoid reliance on that site, having been “sanctioned” several times before, it provides a very stable backup. The fact I joined a student organisation that uses GitHub for development doesn’t help. :)

I made a 1kb-sized landing page, available here among other places. Though it was just a fun challenge over an evening, it’s actually rather professional, and I connected it to a new domain that’ll probably be my “serious businessman” space, with name-surname in it and all. With servers down, I tried hosting this tiny “site” on Cloudflare Pages, but it didn’t work out. Something to do with Firefox.

Back to paper

With Hibiscus.txt even more dead than usual (you think I can keep up consistent journaling?), I’ve turned to paper, and have actually been enjoying writing daily entries there. Might try always keeping a small notebook on me too. As a CS student, my eyes are seriously starting to hurt from having to stare at a screen so much, making me appreciate more “traditional” ways of storing information. I still love my new-ish tablet for studying, but am mindful of when I use it.