Paperwork rant

This is going to be a rant.

I faxed Google's paperwork really early after we got it (27th of June IIRC). Now we've been told that if we haven't received confirmation yet we should re-submit! The problem is that in the mean time I've moved houses in Southampton, UK where I'm going to uni. Just after I moved houses I left all my stuff there -including my certification that proves I'm a full time student and that I had faxed the day before- and took the train to Belgium, where I officially live. So now I'm here in Belgium staying with my parents for the next two months and Google asks me to resend my application!

I guess they'll have to be happy with just my student card then. Nothing else I can offer them now. It can't be really my fault that they've lost my first fax can it?

Upgrading a P100

Since I'm ranting I can as well continue. We have here a Pentium I 100MHz box that serves as a print server and sometimes as a thin client. Last week I upgraded it from Debian Woody to Sarge, it did have some trouble with generating the xfont caches tho. So after letting it churn away for a couple of days I intrrupted it. Removed all the non-essential xfonts from the machine (it can get it's fonts form a remote font server I decided) I gave it another go. Same story. So I looked into the font directory: about 2000 fonts. dpkg -S /path/to/font: no one owns the fonts! Ok, rm /path/to/fonts/*. Rerun upgrade. Yay! Test print server, all works. Shut box down.

Next day I want to print something. Boot box: LI and that's it! Yay, interupting the installation will have messed up the configure scripts of lilo. No problem, make boot floppy (or make 5 of them, them unreliable old floppies) boot....or not. Floppy drive was not used in years and seems dead. (Oh, did I mention the box is that old that it doens't boot from cdrom). Right, so where do I find a other floppy dirve. Found a Sun Ultra 10 on the attic that's not being used and got the floppy drive out, installed it in the P100. Boot: rescue root=/dev/hdb1 Yay! Run lilo.

Hurray! After 5 days of upgrading the box does again what it should do...