Rich McAllister

10:48 pm: Computers
A couple weeks ago the garage Windows machine, which is pretty much used only to play BBC World Service while I work on other stuff, died.  That was OK, really; it had been limping along for about 8 months; first Linux wouldn't boot, then plugging any USB devices in caused a bus wedge, then it refused to boot off the hard drive and only would come up if I put a GRUB CD in that chainloaded to the hard drive.  That wasn't bad, it was Linda's old system that I replaced, so it was kind of surplus anyway.  So once it died hard, I got a nice up-to-date AMD Phenom quad and new motherboard, built a nice new system with the plan I'd run the current garage mail-web server and Windows BBC-World-Service machines as VMs under VirtualBox.  This worked really well; $550 was enough to turn this old box into a server I would have killed to have three years ago.   Plus, I really like doing a build-it-yourself box every couple of years. I like learning where the technology is going, I actually enjoy dealing with the various annoyances (surprise ground faults, chipsets too new for the LInux distriubtions to be up to.)  This particular upgrade was extremely painless, everything came up first time, and it was just finding the workaround for the sound driver so World Service could be heard.

But then, I  decided to have a short nap this afternoon; when I got up I found my main Windows box had crashed and won't come up (no messages from the BIOS, HD light comes on hard.)  Haven't figured out what the problem is, but dammit I'm not READY  for another round of hardware debugging.

On the third hand, this is about the worst thing that's happened to me in three years.  Life's pretty good, y'know?