This morning i've been playing Dungeons and Desktops, and it does lead to a rather positive feeling of making incremental progress.
The puttering with Amazon Web Services is because we are no longer colocating a mac mini in a data center, from which i could serve my web site (and Christine was hosting many others). It now sits in the living room, and i am crawling my blogs to make a static archive to put back up on the internet. I crawled for 12 hours before realizing something about how the crawler was configured was making an infinite depth of pages by inserting the path elements in over and over.
This is also posted at http://elainegrey.dreamwidth.org/431994.html .