Another Word for Nerd

This makes me feel a lot better about my formerly-messy house.

Finished my FrankenPIX project today. Ran it at home for a couple hours tonight, but I need to replace the CPU heatsink fan before I put it into duty permanently. The existing fan is squeaky and rattles, making it very annoying to have across the room. Amy said “it sounds like a box full of cockroaches”.

Got the other main part of the FrankenPIX Project in today, the Intel SE440BX-2 motherboard that I bought off eBay a little over a week ago. Total cost was $19 or so, shipped. I’ve got the PIX flash card, threw in a couple of 64M PC100 RAM sticks I had lying around, and am getting the Intel PCI network cards from a friend tomorrow. Assuming I can dig a power supply and ATX case out of the trash pile at work, I’ll end up with a PIX 520-equivalent firewall for less than $50.

Eventually I want to do like this guy and find a proper PIX-like case for the setup instead of having it in a desktop ATX case.

You know, you’d think the Pepsi/Apple “One in Three Bottles is a Free Song on iTunes” promotion would be a bit smarter than to print win/notwin on the underside of caps.. of TRANSPARENT BOTTLES.

By not even looking that hard, I got 2 winners out of four bottles of Diet Pepsi tonight just by tilting the bottle just right and looking to see if “PLEASE TRY AGAIN” was obvious on the bottom of the cap.

My quest to build a FrankenPIX is going well. I was able to score a 16M Cisco ISA flash card, got an Intel SE440BX-2 motherboard off eBay, and have a bid in on a 5-pack of the necessary Intel 10/100 network cards. Now I just need to dig up an ATX power supply and an appropriate ATX case.

“The Renaissance Faire may not be the source of all your problems, but it sure as shit isn’t helping any.”

We finally got disgusted with having a two-car garage full of junk, so we rented a construction dumpster and are throwing away everything that we haven’t used or touched in over a year. Most of the garage is going; I’m tired of holding stuff for people for more than two years who haven’t bothered to pick any of it up.

This is with the garage about half done; a lot more stuff was added by the time we got done for the day earlier today. We’ll finish it over the next couple of days (mostly a lot of old DEC VAX/VMS manuals and computer trash) and then empty the closets in the house. Anybody need an adult’s 15-speed bicycle, basically brand new? Just needs new tires.. Otherwise, its going in with the rest of this.