The simple answer is, you can't.

I didn't want cats while we were here in the US. And yet, we have three of them.

We made the decision not to take our current cat with us from Australia, because of the length of the journey, and the fact that we were planning on being away a lot travelling, and because of the length of time she'd have to stay in quarantine when we returned to Australia.

Then along came Stumpy, a cat we were supposed to be temporarily fostering, because she was hit by a car, had a broken pelvis and lost her tail. She was all sweet while she was convalescing, and Sarah really wanted to adopt her, so I caved in.

Stumpy was probably less than a year old, so still at the boisterous kitten age, and sure enough, she recovered, and became a boisterous kitten again. To the point where she was so energetic, she needed a little friend to wear her out, and I was asked if we could get a second cat, and since I seem to have problems saying no to anything (but heck, I was getting attacked in bed by her in the middle of the night as well), along came Lily (wow, Sarah really needs to spot breaking all the image links in her blog posts).

Sarah was taking Lily back to the shelter we adopted her from, for her shots, and was asked if she'd foster a tiny 4 week old kitten, that was going to have to be euthanized if a foster home wasn't found for her. We still have Smudge today, months later, technically still as a foster, but we intend to adopt her as well, because she's such a sweet little kitten, and of the three, she's the most affectionate towards me. Call this one "my" cat.

Then I look at the destruction these cats have caused. I look at the damage to the really nice dining suite we bought shortly before moving over here. The leather chairs are scratched terribly. The nice wooden table top has scratches in it as well, because they liked to use it as a playground. I was setting the table tonight because we've got people coming round for dinner (it's been a while), and I saw first hand the extent of the damage. I was so pissed off I could have cried.

After our last trip away, the cats got sufficiently bored that Stumpy thought chewing on laptop power adapter cables would be fun. My laptop no longer charges. (I'd just had said power adapter replaced under warranty not two weeks previously).

Don't get me wrong, I love cats, I just so didn't want them right now, and especially right now, I'm wishing I'd stuck to my guns on that one. I think I'd have rather brought LC over from Australia, and not have her become obese by the new owner we found for her, than have so much of our stuff be destroyed by three kittens in a small townhouse that we're away from too often to give them the attention they need as kittens.

Sigh.

Well, mirror.linux.org.au has been cut over to the new hardware.

It wasn't particularly pretty, and the old hardware is no longer available as a reference (for a little while), because it's in Steve Walsh's car boot on the way to Melbourne.

So far, I think the only things I overlooked were /etc/aliases and /etc/proftpd.conf. The former is a mild inconvenience, the latter left FTP busted for a couple of days until I realised. I also spent far too many hours this afternoon head-butting the keyboard over what I presumed to be an Apache configuration problem (and technically it was) with respect to Drupal.

So, if you're reading this and you discover some aspect of the mirror to be broken, drop the admin address an email, and it'll go into the tracking system. The Debian mirror is current resyncing.

Now I'm going to go and see in the New Year...

I've been holding off blogging a number of things because I've got a list of time-sensitive tasks as long as my arm to do in my capacity as a volunteer sysadmin for Linux Australia.

The immediate pressing one is to swap mirror.linux.org.au over to new hardware with more disk capacity. I've been trying to do this whilst globetrotting to Australia for a holiday, Spain for a Debian QA meeting, and Las Vegas for Christmas. So work on it's been a bit fragmented.

Tonight was going to be the night of the cutover. I've had the new machine on a different address while I synced configs (and content), and tonight I swapped IP addresses around so that the old machine would have the IP address that the new machine had, and the new machine would have mirror.linux.org.au's IP address. I rebooted both machines, and...

Neither one has come back.

Sigh.

And of course, it's late afternoon on a Friday in Australia, I'll bet Steve isn't even working this week, so he can't take a look at it. I can't think what I've bollocksed up, but any ARP conflict on the upstream router should have sorted itself out by now. Damn.

I'm currently in (the really lovely) Philadelphia airport again, waiting for my connecting flight to San Francisco.

I'm rapidly arriving at the conclusion that it is easier to enter the US once you've landed on US soil, than it is to depart from the country bound for the US.

I had the most harrowing experience of my life this morning, trying to check in for my return flight.

Due to the way various people's itineraries worked out, I ended up having to share a taxi from Badajoz to Madrid Airport at 12:30am. My flight didn't depart until something like 12:20pm, but the bus with the bulk of the people on it wasn't going to get me to the airport with less than 2 hours before departure, and I didn't want to risk missing my flight, especially given I'm feeling under the weather.

So I got to the airport at about 4am, having had little sleep in the taxi. Terminal 1 has a real dearth of seating for people waiting to check in. I spent 4 hours trying to make myself as comfortable as possible on the hard floor, and didn't get a lot of sleep then either.

For the record, check-ins (at least for US Airways) seem to open around 4 hours before the scheduled departure time.

So I went to check in, and the way they were working it was there was a bunch of podiums out the front of what I would consider a conventional check-in counter. The people at these podiums then proceeded to give you your first Spanish Inquisition. I'd previously remarked to myself at how trivial it was to get into Spain...

I was asked the purpose of my trip to Spain. I told the woman it was for a business meeting. She then asked where I'd spent my time I Spain. I told her Badajoz. She asked if I had a hotel receipt to show for it. I told her the accommodation was paid for my someone else. She then asked if I had any business cards to show for the business meeting. Sheesh, I thought. Luckily I still had all the copies of people's keys leftover from the keysigning we did, and some of them were in a business card format, so I pulled out a fistful of them and gave them to her. Oh, and she wanted to see a copy of my itinerary, and seemed satisfied that the flights were a reversal of what got me there in the first place.

She wandered off with my passport, itinerary and the fistful of "business cards" and came back, seemingly satisfied that everything was in order. She stuck little blue stickers on my luggage and passport (the size of an Australian convenience-store price tag) and I was allowed to wait for the next check-in person. The rest of the checking-in process was fairly normal.

I can appreciate the airline wanting to avoid having to deal with passengers being refused entry to the US, but I had a valid US visa in my passport, so that should make all of that a moot point. I don't know why I had to prove my trip's legitimacy to the airline.

So I thought that was the end of it. Hardly. Terminal 1 of Madrid Airport seems to have heaps of gates, with a letter/number combination. Mine was in the B series, and I went through the security screening, and it became apparent that I had to go through another guard post looking thing to get from the A series to the B series. The signage looked like it said "Police".

Anyway, the guy there had so-so English, and he initially was a little unhappy that I had an Australian passport and was flying to the US and not Australia. I pointed out the US visa, and he seemed less concerned. Then he asked me to say something in Spanish. I don't know if he was trying to be conversational, or I had to be able to speak some Spanish to get past or what the story was, but by this stage I was pretty tired, and this caught me totally off guard. I think I stammered out a Buenos días or something. He then wanted to know how many hours it took to fly from Australia to Spain. I told him I had no idea, because I'd only flown from the US to Spain. He then begrudgingly gave me an exit stamp in my passport, and I was allowed on my way.

I think the whole thing was made the more harrowing by the fact I was deadly tired, the Police guy didn't speak terribly fantastic English, and I wasn't expecting a second Spanish Inquisition (let alone the first).

Oh, and closer to boarding time, they chucked everyone out of the lounge area closest to the gate, and rechecked everyone's passports and boarding passes. That was fair enough, and not unlike what happens in Sydney going to the US, but they don't even let you into the lounge area in the first place.

That departure process was more what I would have expected an entry process to be like, and has put me off returning to Spain a little bit. The entry process was a joke. The guy barely looked at my passport long enough to give me the entry stamp.

Fortunately I slept for the bulk of the flight from Madrid to Philly, and now I'm feeling a bit more human.

Well this is all a bit exciting. This is my first real foray into a country that doesn't speak English. Hong Kong was so bilingual it wasn't really a challenge. Here ¿Hablas inglés? is the first order of the day, otherwise I have to fumble my way through ¿Cómo consigo al terminal cuatro? with my head stuck in the Lonely Planet.

The flight to Madrid was fairly uneventful. US Airways doesn't suck any more or less than United. No luggage lost or damaged. I bounced of Philadelphia, and that's a pretty cool airport. Lots of white rocking chairs littered in the middle of the concourse for general consumption, and a veritable shopping mall within the airport.

Terminal 4 of Madrid Airport is a spiffy new looking thing. Very architectural, I like it. I've got a few hours to kill here while I wait for the European contingent to arrive, so I can catch up on my post-vacation work email backlog...

Certainly a different way to spend a birthday.