Utter Randomness

First, my favorite quotes from today’s reading:

If you scat­ter thorns, don’t go barefoot.
–Ital­ian Proverb

The body is a sacred garment.
–Martha Graham

Man’s main task in life is to give birth to him­self, to become what he poten­tial­ly is.
–Erich Fromm

Well, first more randomness&hekkip;

I love this com­put­er case! Thanks jenk 🙂

I had no idea that there’s a Pulitzer for crit­i­cism. The guy who wrote The One Ring, The True Sword got it, though.

The cat just synched my PDA. Real­ly. That’s a new one. I won­der if she added any­thing to the to-do list? “Open cans of tuna for cat” most likely.

I did a very stu­pid thing yes­ter­day. A com­put­er mon­i­tor was about to fall, and I grabbed it by push­ing my left knee up under it and grab­bing it with my hands. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the posi­tion I was in meant that I real­ly used my low­er back mus­cles, and that was bad, and I pulled some­thing. And it trig­gered a major pain flare, which is still with me. I don’t like to whine, so I’ll stop now.

That, how­ev­er, is why I did not accom­pa­ny shad­owkatt and sam­bear to curiousmay9’s place today. They and she and her friend got the rafters up for the stu­dio! Roof rais­ing is Sat­ur­day. I’m hop­ing I can be use­ful by then.

I have been geek­ing when able today. We had the CD burn­er in the Lin­ux box, and that was­n’t work­ing well—not user-friend­ly enough. I moved it to this PC, the one I use most often. Which was fine, except that it only made coast­ers. Hmm. Then the machine decid­ed it had some sort of hor­rif­ic low-lev­el resource con­flict and would­n’t go into Win­dows at all any­more when the burn­er was hooked up. Hmph. The burn­er is back in the kids’ machine now.

The IDE con­troller inte­grat­ed into this motherboard—gah. You know, nor­mal­ly, if there is a row of sim­i­lar con­nec­tors, pin 1 is going to be on the same side for all of them, yes? At least, it has been on every OTHER moth­er­board I’ve worked on. And MOST of them also label such things. Not this lit­tle Data Gen­er­al, oh no. Pin 1 for the flop­py cable con­nec­tor is to the right. Pin 1 for the IDE con­nec­tors is to the left. And there are no labels except for the oh so help­ful “hd1” and “hd2” which I could fig­ure out for myself, thanky­ou­very­much. I don’t think they fig­ured any­body would ever need to know that, as the case is built in such a way that it is very near­ly impos­si­ble to get to said con­nec­tors any­way. My hands are not a pret­ty sight. I was wish­ing, very much, for telekine­sis. Just a little.

Andre came home from god­dessin­ga’s place a few weeks ago. We start­ed to rebuild him last night. We did­n’t get very far, because he won’t give us a video sig­nal. Nope, not a bit. Grrr. I need to dig out anoth­er video card and see if that helps. Maybe he’s just miss­ing Tom­Tom. (Those two are named for cats we used to have who were milk-broth­ers. We lost both to feline leukemia with­in a month of each oth­er in 2000.)

We’re down­load­ing Red Hat 9 ISOs now, so more geek­i­ness ahead.