06/02/2003 Entry: "Weekend Wrap-up: Housework, blowing up computers, and relatives having babies"
I got a lot of housework done this weekend. I managed to get all the loads of laundry done, did some vacuuming, mowed the lawns, cleaned up the kitchen, and manage to fix up some of those old computers I had lying about. In the future, I think I am going to put my tech stuff in a separate purple box, so readers know when to skip it if they are not interested. WARNING: GEEK TECH NOTES | One of them died (Mononoke, my previous printer server). I never knew the keyboard port, of all things, could short out and catch fire. But it did. I am not sure what happened, but when I took the box apart to try and salvage some parts, I noticed there were some loose metal things in them. I am not sure if they were the cause of the short, or the result of the small explosion. The explosion took out the motherboard (a proprietary Dell mobo), a NIC (right next to the port), and the keyboard plug attached to the port. When I plugged it in, there was the curl of white smoke, a "PAP!" and then gray smoke before I unplugged it. I salvaged wheat I could, marked them as "possibly bad" (hard drives, floppy, sound card, CD-ROM, etc.), and chucked the rest in the trash.So I worked on an old 486 DX4 100mhz that my friend Nate had once given me. It was a computer he was fixing for someone, and they never picked it back up. I swear, that machine is old. I think it's from 1995, according to the BIOS. It's the oldest working box I have. I upgraded it to 32mb RAM, swapped the 504mb HD with a 1.2GB one, and played the "which ISA NIC works?" game. I got an old NE2000 card to work with Tomsrtbt (Linux on a floppy) and RedHat 9.0 (which told me *after* install that the box did not meet the specs required, what a waste of an hour that was!), but on OpenBSD, while it detected it, could not seem to read any input the card gave, and I kept getting "device timeout" with DHCP. I did manage to find another ISA NIC in the bottom of a box, an SMC something, and that worked. "Install XFree86?" it asked on install. Hah! Yeah, I have run X on a P133, and it was so slow, I can't image it on this box. Gees, just to do a "make" on bash, it took 10 minutes (on a P166, it takes 40 seconds). No thank you. "/usr/ports/X11/kde/make all" would probably not stop compiling until my son's graduation. |
In other news, we found out Christine's niece (Erica, from her oldest sister Debbie), is pregnant, so Christine is going to be a great aunt again! Christine's the youngest sibling of her mother's children, and so she has a lot of nieces around her age. Christine's been a great aunt at least 4 times that I know of, and she has many nieces and nephews. I have no siblings or parents, so I will never have a niece or nephew. The closest I could be "congratulated" on is my cousin Lisa's daughter Sydney, who was born last year. I don't know Lisa that well, I have only met her a few times in my life, and while each time was very pleasant, she and I don't really know each other. So I have to live vicariously through my wife's family.
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