Had a bizarre sort of set of issues with my home server setup during the course of the day that had me frustrated to the point of wondering if it was worth it to even run the damn thing.  I caught myself thinking, I don’t really need to have my own server.  I could pay for hosting and run something like Google Apps for mail.  Why am I doing to this to myself?

But the real reason is: I enjoy the frustration, I guess.  By the end of the day (before I went to sleep, anyway), I had everything figured out put back together again.  All’s well that ends as such.  I learned a couple more things in the process and might not spend as much time on a similar problem the next time through.

People have asked me more than once how or why I could enjoy all the inherent tinkering and tweaking and troubleshooting that comes along with this sort of setup.  In my mind, they system is never perfect; it’s never working exactly as well as it should.  There is always something extra I could be doing, and that voyage of discovery is what I enjoy and what makes this a hobby.  Make no mistake, it is one that drives me nuts and keeps me up nights on occasion, but I don’t think I’ll actually be selling out to Google and giving up on it any time soon.

… Just don’t ever ask me the same question while I’m the middle of an upgrade (!!!).