This little quote, which can ironically be found etched in stone on the stairs leading up to one of the exits of the Metro bus tunnel in downtown Seattle, sums up the past couple of weeks quite well. Once again, the bell has tolled, beginning the next round of the continuous upgrade process we must contuinually fight in the den to avoid a fate worse than having your system destroyed by the "Good Times" virus. Before I continue any further, however, I would like to apologize for not posting a new column last week. Throwing caution to the wind, I will now proceed to ruin a good apology with an excuse. Here goes:
Once again, utter chaos has ensued. Nothing unusual, right? At least not for the den. Anyway, this morning, everything seemed perfectly normal in the den (with the possible exception of Zippy's external hard drive needing to be jump-started due to the recent cold weather...) Until my dad got home from work today. Apparently, they were doing a little "cleaning" at his workplace, and this included more than an insignificant pile of techno-junk. Since the stuff was going to be tossed anyway, he decided it might be worthwhile to grab a few things. First of all, he grabbed an old Apple ImageWriter II (apparently, there were quite a few Mac SE's in the pile. It's a pity he didn't bring one of those... would have made a great doorstop.) We plan to dump this one on my Mac-using uncle.
Within the past couple of weeks, this same uncle has produced yet another AOL-cancellation horror story to add to the multitudes of pentient (and now recovering) AOL users. After being unable to connect in a week, he called to cancel his account. When he told them that he had been unable to use the service in a week, he was told service in his area would be improved... in six months. Those guys in AOL customer service seem to have a lame excuse for everything. (If anyone out there has any AOL-cancellation horror stories, go ahead and e-mail them to me. If I get enough of them, I may do a compilation of these in the coming weeks. At this point, AOL appears due for another serious bashing... Keep watching.)
After that came the good part. Next came an HP ScanJet Plus. I quickly hooked it up and secured the necessary software for the sucker off the Net, only to find out an interesting fact: Apparently the thing requires an interface card. Having heard more tham my share of horror stories about HP technical support at work, I decided not to risk it. File this one under the "known issues" category. Remember kids, it's not a bug, it's an undocumented feature!
Recently, as our raging Descent battles in the Den have left several complaints about who gets stiffed with the old 486 (usually the one who seems to get all of the mega-missiles and plasma cannons, strangely enough.) With the rest of the pile organized (if such a thing is possible in the den,) the big one came out: A dead DX2/66. Apparently, the thing was purchased about a year ago, and it never has worked properly. A replacement was acquired, and the thing was put out of sight, out of mind (especially when no RMA for the thing was recieved.) They were finally tired of the thing cluttering the shelves, any my dad took the sucker home, savinug it from the dumpster. As another PS/2 was on the way to the dumpster (what use does anyone have for one of those things, anyway?) my dad took out the DX2 CPU from the thing, and stuck it on the "dead" motherboard.
When he got home, me and my brother got to messing around with the beast, flipped the thing on, and got what almost sounded like a normal POST code. We quickly attached a monitor (the thing had onboard video) and found that it was in fact an almost normal POST code. The system was complaining about having no hard disk, floppy disk, keyboard or mouse, but other than that, it seemed happy. Having several floppy drives hanging around, we stuck one in, and made a boot floppy for the system, and found it to work. Even after 24 hours, this newcomer was still functioning normally.
It was apparent at this point that this "dead" system wasn't quite as dead as we had thought. When Saturday rolled around, we set out to try to resurrect this system. The system has previously been gutted for parts, and if it weren't for the fact that it's I/O and video were onboard, we probably wouldn't have been able to doo much with the thing for a while. The 840MB hard drive that was purchased a few weeks ago was put into this system (thus ending the round of "Musical Disks" before it started) and the purchase of an 8X CD-ROM for the sole purpose of installing an OS on the thing. Rocky also got a new video card, thus removing one of the major bottlenecks on it's performance. After throwing everything in it's proper place, by some miracle, it all worked.
The new system has been named "Lazarus" because of how it has been miraculously called back from the dead. Confirming the fact that it was the CPU that was responsible for Lazarus' previous nonworking state was the fact that another of the same system was recently ordered at the factory my dad sysadmins at, which also had a dead CPU at the time of purchase.
Just when I thought having a semi-current setup for computing in the den was finally a reality, reality decided to be mean and nasty. At work, everyone is being moved all over the place, and it just happens that I got moved to a place where my data-access system happened to be an extremely old 386, of all things. Immediately, the thing started acting up, crashing in the middle of a call 3 times the first day. It's no wonder that the 386 systems at work are considered a concern for employee turnaround...
After the first day, this system had started to obviously get on my nerves a little (and if you believe that, you probably think that Niagra Falls is just a little drippy.) In order to cope with both the ancient technology and lusers I am required to face, I have resorted to the use of Nerf weaponry. Survival in tech support almost nearly requires the use of such objects (although more potent alternatives exist, those guys who actually pay us to do this stuff would most likely frown on their use on the systems.) It seemed like I was doomed to certain obsolescence, the mouse stopped working for some strange reason. Maybe sometime next week, IS will send someone down to plug the thing back in... For now, I'm just looking for whoever calls in sick, and borrowing their system for a day or two.
Maybe I'll just sell off everything in the den, throw in my life's savings and use it to buy a Tickle-Me Elmo doll. At least there isn't as much that can go wrong with one of those things.