Laugh Last

Since laying my previous workstation to rest, the gods of ill-fortune openly jeer me on.

When a system fails, one expects a bit of hardware loss. I lost my primary hard drive, CPU, and motherboard. The RAM may be still usable, but suitable placement for unemployed RAMBus cards is harder to locate than a living wage in Appalachia.

I maintain a substantial stock of spare parts, so hardware losses were mere irritations. I regularly archive my data products; restoring my environment was trivial. My workstation was reincarnated with a minimum of headache. I laughed at the gods.

My smugness was not unrewarded. Less than one day later, my power supply failed; I repaired it. Within a week, my above-board NIC failed; I replaced it. By the end of the next week, the installation of Ubuntu 8.10 proved too quirky for my pleasure; I reverted to Ubuntu 8.04.2 and life seemed finally good.

A disturbing low din of derision continued troubling me. I would return to my workstation at the start of my day to find X behaving strangely. Applets were missing. Mouse clicks provoked nothing. Restarting X didn't help. Rebooting the workstation was the only remedy.

Now … I should confess that GUI does not suit me well. I spend most of my time composing code in a terminal window. I live in server space – applications annoy me … but they are necessary evils.

Software updates often require a system restart. Today, my mouse misfired and triggered a calendar applet. For a while, I casually dismissed the non-event, but the appointment calendar did not launch and subsequent mouse clicks had no effect.

Using <Ctrl><Alt><F1>, I left GUI and entered console mode. I instinctively typed shutdown -r now and was poised to strike <Enter> when I heard the gods begin snickering. In the nick of time, I inserted <Ctrl>Ups aucx before striking <Enter>.

One process stood out like Andre the Giant at gathering of Oompa Loompa. I noted the finding and rebooted my workstation.

A short time later, my GUI returned. I launched a browser and compelled Google to enlighten me of my dilemma by researching "ubuntu calendar 'gnome-panel --sm-client-id'". Lo! Google proclaimed awareness with the first result and further study revealed the conspiring gods.

To make a long story shorter, the problem is resolved. My workstation is performing like Michael Schumacher. O! GODS! Who laughs last?