I woke up yesterday morning in Tuscon. A lovely day…
Went to look at my ancient Palm IIIxe. It had crashed in a way that required erasing its memory. Sad, since I had no way to restore it until I returned home.
Spent the morning fixing some horrible borkenness I had helped create in some software. After that, flew home. At the Tuscon airport, logged into my home gateway box to check my email. It appeared to have been broken into.
Got home, and went upstairs to my desktop box. The display was corrupted due to some X failure.
It was way past bedtime, so I gave up trying to fix things and prepared for bed. My CPAP machine (for my obstructive sleep apnea) was broken.
Sometimes you just want to cry. This was one of those times.
All's well that ends well. I tried the CPAP machine again when I got up in the middle of the night, and this time it worked well enough to get me through morning. The X display turned out to be a Debian version of Intel driver thing on my i965 display; I switched from "EXA" to "XAA" rendering on the advice of Keith Packard and it went away. The evidence of breakin was from a 2-hour power failure we had had that ran out my UPS: I'm assuming until I investigate further that things are benign. I still need to clean up and restore the Palm, but I'm sure it will work great.
I wish I had some great moral lesson or deep thought here. I could pontificate about how these seemingly unrelated failures were actually co-related, but it doesn't seem like they mostly were. I could give some cheery "darkest before the dawn" speech, but at this point if I could flee computing altogether I'd be tempted. (B)
"It's just a bunch of stuff that happened." —The Simpsons