As I’ve discussed over the last few days, I’ve been performing hardware surgery on bellerophon, the server that provides you with this website. All has gone reasonably well, but not ideally, and so I brought her into the office here to work out the booting problem that was puzzling me.

I had employed the highly-regarded Carbon Copy Cloner, an Applescript-based drive duping utility, to mirror old to new, but the new boot drive was not playing nice. So. Testing matrix in, um, head, I began to experiment with boot settings this morning. Unfortunately for me, shortly thereafter, the main boot drive, the one with six months of tried and true tinkering and mind-bending installation trickery (are you listening to me, Image Magick?) refused to acknowledge my desires.

So… bellerophon was booting only into OS9, which can work well enough to serve static content but, for example, my Gallery-based photo site, which depends on PHP and MySQL, wouldn’t couldn’t won’t work in OS9. And this blog, which employs the perl-based Movable Type, would serve static content well enough, but new content would have to be hand-embroidered, the way macho men crank the code. (There may, in fact be some sort of Yatta tie in).

So I was looking at the “torn folder” icon, Mac OS X’s new way of saying, “you are screwed”, when the phone rings.

It was a prospective employer, checking to make sure I hadn’t gone and gotten a job or anything, because they wanted to reactivate me as a candidate for a position.

“Is this the producer/coordinator position?”

Naturally, it’s a technical position performing web work. I thank the pleasant fellow. He had the decision-maker vibe. I go out on a limb (a short one, really – who do you think is the most influential economic force in the Puget Sound region) and ask if they are .NET-based or headed in that direction. Yes, why yes, they are.

So… I have an immediate economic imperative to get bellerophon back into the sky. A bit of poking about reveals that Apple is pretty insistent upon a full reinstall to a clean disk in this variety of failure. And so began my afternoon.