Our business runs on a shoestring. People laugh at our dilapidated skunk-infested trailer house offices. They mock our antiquated computer system comprising software running on a twenty-year-old Atari ST computer. Yet these very laughing points have helped Custom Box remain profitable for twenty years.

Things are falling apart now, however.

First there was the skunk incident. (The scent still lingers, by the way; I'm burning a candle this morning in an effort to fight it.)

Now our beloved Atari ST has died. Or, more precisely, the hard drive has failed. (The computer itself fails once every few years, and we simply replace it with a new one from eBay.) This causes us great woe. We have no backups. All of our data is on that hard drive, but the hard drive doesn't want to boot.

Yes, this was an exceptionally poor business practice.

That doesn't matter now. What matters now is a) retrieving that data and/or b) getting a replacement system up-and-running as quickly as possible.

Fortunately, ours is the sort of business that is not wholly reliant on our computer. We still used the Atari for order entry, scheduling, and invoicing. We've been using PCs to do estimating — or most crucial application — for several years. But for just a couple of weeks, we can run our business by hand. This is one of the best times of year for this to happen, too; we're generally slow for a couple weeks now, and that'll give us time to recover.

In 2002, I spent two weeks writing software to replicate the Atari's functionality on the PC. The project went well. I managed to get the job 90% done and then, inexplicably, I stopped working on it. All I had to do was iron out a few remaining nasty bugs to make the programs usable. I'm crying because I didn't finish.

Now I'll have to complete the programs, but it will take longer. It'll take me a day or so to re-familiarize myself with Visual Basic and with the programs I created, then it'll take me about a week to fix the last lingering bugs.

It would only have taken a matter of hours to finish this project three years ago.

"I had a dream last night," Kris told me this morning. "Dave and Andrew had some cockamamie idea for the three of you to go to Alaska. They wanted to live in the wild or something."

"I had a dream, too," I said. "I met my old friend B. from high school. He showed me the place he was living, a trailer house. 'Wow!' I said at one point. 'I can't believe this! This is exactly the same trailer floorplan as the one I grew up in, the one where we have Custom Box Service's offices.' B. then showed me the rest of the property. 'What's that?,' I asked, indicating a series of concrete highway dividers. 'That's were we keep the lions,' said B. 'Lions?' I asked. 'That won't hold them, will it?' 'Sure,' he said. 'Besides, I let them out every Sunday to play with the kids.'"

"You sure were the loudest snorer last night," Kris said, and then I left for work.

On this day at foldedspace.org

2004 — Food Group   It occurs to me that it would be fun to form a Food Group. The Food Group would operate in a similar style to a book group, meeting once a month to prepare food in a member's home.

2002 — Happiness Things   Kristin and I are exchanging e-mail. I just bought Buckaroo Banzai and Joe Versus the Volcano. I found a great Conan comics compilation. Andrew is home from Australia.