Stan’s Obligatory Blog

Made an attempt at fixing the system today.

Since the board and CPU I have are over two years old, I thought I’d start there. I got a new MSI board and Athlon 2000 processor at PC Club in Monrovia. Brought it home. Put it together. The thing wouldn’t power on. The CPU fan twitched a bit, so I knew there was power, but it wouldn’t start. Back to the store and exchange the board. Bring the new board home. Same thing. So I get a new power supply from Best Buy. Now it powers on. I don’t know why, but what the hell.

So now the machine boots. But now Xwindows is broken. My old S3 video card can’t fit in the new AGP slot, so I have to use the built-in VGA card on the new board. Turns out that I need to upgrade Xfree86 to be able to use it. So I build a new X server from the ports collection, and then I fire it up. The monitor goes blank and says “OUT OF RANGE”.

So I spend a couple of hours tweaking the XF86Config file and searching with Google before I finally find the problem. I have to have ‘Option “Use BIOS” “off”‘ in the X config. I do this and now it works. And then the computer locks up hard.

The system locked up hard several times. At this point, the only original components in the system are the memory stick and the Linksys Ethernet card. I took out the Ethernet card and ran for a bit until it locked up again.

Mommy took Lucinda to see the Caltech-Occidental Concert Band this evening. The show was Lucinda’s first time seeing a real concert.

The machine locked up again today at about 11:30 or so.

Installed the new chipset cooler.

Today we went to the Hollywood Entertainment Museum. We had heard that they had an exibit about Hedy Lamarr and the invention of spread-spectrum radio. When we got there, they said that the exhibit had been canceled, but we decided to go in and have a look anyway. They have the Max Factor collection from the former Max Factor Museum, so we wanted to see it again. We saw the head analyzer, the kissing machine, and lots of other fun stuff. So it was still a fun time.

Bought a new CPU fan and one new case fan. Also, ordered a new chipset cooler from the Soyo web site.

The machine locked up overnight. I had to pull the power cord to get it unwedged. Then it locked up again this evening. I suspect heat problems. Took the cover off and rigged a fan blowing in to the case.

We still have the praying mantis. It’s been living in its cage in the kitchen. Here is a picture of it eating a spider.

Set up a link so Lucinda’s computer can access the Web. Set up a Squid 2.5 proxy server on Moe. Gave the dc1 interface an IP address of 192.168.2.1 and gave her computer 192.168.2.2. Made a long crossover cable to connect them.

Today we all went to the Science Museum in Exposition Park to see the Risk exhibit. This is about probability and perception of risk. It was pretty interesting. It also seemed somewhat appropriate, since fires are raging in the mountains. Lucinda was a bit afraid of the bed of nails at first, but after she tried it, she liked it enough to do it six more times.

There were also some exhibits on the second floor from the Exploratorium in San Francisco.

www.1134.org/lucinda/photos/index.php?string=&ayear=2003&amonth=10&aday=26&byear=2003&bmonth=10&bday=26&submit=Search

After the museum, we all had dinner at El Torito before going home.