Tuesday

Still raining,. no change there.

My motherboard, memory and CPU turned up today. The motherboard is wonderful it's got everything and a *spare* kitchen sink. Actually the board is rather colourful and a lot more featured than I'd expected with connectors for smart card readers, memory stick readers and secure data memory readers. If I could find the hardware I'd probably use them. The SPDIF/RCA/5.1 audio is a bit of a bonus. all in all a very nice board

Had fun trying to get the heatsink attached to the board. It was kinda tight but it's fixed nice and snuggly now. I was tempted to try and get some silver thermal compound but the Intel docs sugested that the thermal tape supplied was the best item to use. I'm still temped to get the silver thermal compound though.

Spent most of the morning/afternoon just tinkering with module code and iddly musing over what size case I should use with the board. I didn't order a case with the original order becaus I wanted to have a feel for what physical restrictions the CPU would make. Based on it's positioning and height, I think I can get away with a midi sized case rather than having to go all the way for a full tower.

Popped over to Rosmary's place to finish out the fixup of her machine only to discover that the soundcard was ancient and did not have Win2K drivers for it. Bugger. Also the internal modem was a win modem that appears to have fried probably through a lightning strike. Disaster. Couldn't do diddly squat. I felt a right chump as I should have spotted that right off yesterday. I probably would have had I not been yakking away trying to catch up with the local events over the last few years. Oh well 8/. Explained to John and Rosemary what was wrong and why it wouldn't work. Told them I'd nip out tomorrow and get replacement equipment to sort it all out.

Back home watched with a little pride/satisfaction as ZenII passed it's first uptime birthday
12:14am up 365 days, 0 min, 60 users, load average: 0.28, 0.28, 0.54

Now I guess we'll sort out an updated kernel for it since it's been running the 2.2 kernel I modified last year. Rmk and myself are wondering if the machine will successfully reboot after being up for so long and what mysterious anomolies will pop up after rebooting. It'll take us a couple of days to agree on a decent 2.4 kernel and options. Fun fun fun.