SuperFail and some fun

I received the C200 and good lord it's hard to open!  The controls/drives being in one removable section is pretty cool but is a huge pain when installing drives...especially when you have adapter boards attached to SCA drives *sigh*

I received the 2 remaining drives I had ordered and installed one into my rx2600.  It seems to be working just fine.  HOWEVER, I installed the other one in the C200 and proceeded to install HP-UX via serial console, lo and behold it gives me I/O errors of some kind and the install halts.  So wondering if it was just HP-UX or what was going on I try to install Ubuntu and it fails too!  Ok so I think 'WTF' to myself and stick it in my Octane2, format it and then write random info to a file.  Eventually I get a boatload of 'BAD BLOCK' errors and what not...ugh well this drive is toast.  So I messaged the person I bought it from and am now waiting for them to respond.

In the mean time I installed 2 of the sun drives from my 711 enclosure into it and they seem to be working just fine.  I also took out some more dead drives from the 711.  So I have 4 dead drives from it now, lol.  Oh well.

More spending

I seem to be a compulsive buyer...actually I know this for a fact.  Oh well *sigh*

Anyway I've recently purchased an HP C200 workstation with no hard drive (has a CD-ROM though) and Extreme Networks Summit 48i switch.  Those should be pretty interesting; I've needed a big switch for a while and I think this one will suffice haha ;)  As I've got this fondness for fibre networks I've found some Alteon switches that should be pretty nice, they've got 12 1000 base sx fibre ports on them and are cheap so I'm going to pick up a few in the near future.

I received 18 of the xbox controllers so I listed 4 3-packs on ebay, one sold and I put up another one, was going to ship it when I was on my way home today but there were too many people at the post office.

Arrival and Disappointment

I got 2 boxes the other day and was very excited to have my new gear. I open the small one first and it's my Compaq mouseman exactly as described (new in a bag) and it's wonderful. I believe it's a newer model than my white one as the connector and model number is different but I'm not sure. Anyway I open the other box which is surprisingly light for having 3 drives in it and lo and behold only one drive is in the box! I sensed no foul play on the box so the seller must have only shipped me 1 drive! How insane, I messaged the person and received a reply saying there should have been 3 drives. I think the person just forgot to put them in somehow and are covering themself.

Later I received another package which contained the O2 motherboard I had ordered, I take it out and hear something rattling around inside. Uh oh, turns out one of the heatsinks had come undone on a chip! I stuck some foam in-between the heatsink and the cpu retainer thing directly overtop of it and it sits there firmly now :P Seems to work fine. I placed the one new drive I received into the O2 to install Irix but the O2 does not seem to want to work with the drive! It works fine in my Octane2 but not the O2...I have no idea why it doesn't work.

As a fun thing I got X working on my Itanic, all I did was take out the FireGL, plug the management board into the motherboard and turned it on. I also set up the system so linux displays system/boot messages through the vga console and serial port 1 while having a login on serial port 0. You wouldn't believe how annoying it is having system messages randomly pop up in your console is...especially a serial console.

As far as a not so fun thing, I'm sick today :( Sore throat it seems, bleh. I had to cancel some plans I had with someone to go to lunch :/ oh well...bleh

Huzzah! an update

Nothing all that exciting has happened since I last updated. I received that matrox card I ordered but the non-x86 systems I have seem to not want to cooperate with it so I'll have to find something else to use on the itanic.

I won 3 18GB 15k scsi drives on ebay last night for 15 bucks shipped, whoo! I also won a black Logitech Mouseman, this is a Compaq branded one but it's the same thing. All I need now is the Wingman version (which is grey) to have all 3 colours, I don't feel like buying the wireless or force-feedback versions as I'd never use them.

I was put into an A+ class in school and tested out of it (woot) so I've only got one class this term (tues/thurs) so I never have to dress up! yay! Anyway I have a hell of a lot of free time now and started actually practicing guitar; I'll probably get a job somewhere in the upcoming week or two (or at least try to find something non-helpdesk) but whatever.

Another fun thing I've been doing is using my tripod to take photographs, I'm really interested in night photography and spent about 15 minutes outside last night messing around with my G6. It's a rather lackluster night camera but whatever (15 second exposure maximum and f/8 minimum aperture).

Purchase of the Itanic

So this asset collection dude on ebay has been selling these HP RX2600 servers for a while on ebay, with 10GB of ram each which is a pretty snazzy deal if you know what I mean. Anyway this other guy has a ZX6000 which is the workstation version, unopened, in another auction and I bid on that but was like 'nahh I won't bid any more' and that would have been $260 at the price I bid it up to but then I bid on this RX seeing as the rest had gone for around $300 before this. So I put in 255.25 seeing as that was the next highest I could put (255) and I win it!!! WTF?!?! I was like aaaauuuuuughhhhh.

I hate unintentional purchases, gah, they suck my bank account dry ahahahaha.

Anyway it's got 2 1.5GHz Itanium2 processors with 10GB ram, no hard drives but 2 of the sleds so I'm good there. I can probably stick the cd-rom from my compaq into it I'd think...whatever it has a scsi port on it.

So anyway I'm waiting for that to arrive...should be interesting.

FireGL for my HPs

I received the two FireGL-UX cards (FireGL 2 PCI) yesterday and forgot that I only had one DVI to VGA converter so I was only able to test one. Since I left my Visualize card in there I also noticed that I wasn't able to use both at once which I had remembered hearing about before so that turns out to be true. Anyway the card works great in my J5600 with HP-UX 11.11 even though HP says it should only work in the J6000 series, hehe whatever. Anyway doesn't really do much for me right now so I took it out and stuck in the old Visualize again.

My fingers feel dry right now :( I hate that feeling, augh it's terrible.

I've been liking my MH-307 very much as well, I think the trem on it makes the strings feel tighter which is nice for the low strings. The blackout bridge sound a lot better in the bridge than the 707 did and it sounds a lot nicer than the Blackjack ATX.

EMG and Blackout fun!

I received the 2nd 707 like I said but instead of putting them both in the MH-307 I decided to do a little split-up fun.  I put the blackout bridge from my Schecter ATX's neck position and stuck it in the bridge of the MH-307 and then wired in the 707s into the neck of both guitars.  How exciting.

I also successfully killed off all the sodas in my house :( how unfortunate (I am a soda addict)

Indy-mation 3

I received the parts from mr Indy and yet the Indy is still not cooperating with the irix install! It's very mean to me :( I think I will go ahead and install linux on it or something, I've not used any of the BSDs much so that might be a consideration too as a learning box. The debian installer could never make my network adapter work on it anyway, not sure why...*shrug*

I received the MH-307 and aside from the terrible buckle scratches on the back and some minor chips it's almost in brand-new condition. That thing is clean, seriously. The frets were a mess so I cleaned those off when I installed the 707 in the bridge. After doing that I sold the HZs so I actually had to go back and remove the neck pickup, I have another 707 coming from a friend so I'll have 2 707s in it soon enough. Killer axe for what will be about 430 dollars after receiving my Live Cashback in a good while from now...argh.

Anyway microsoft took the controllers off of their club live site so I haven't been able to order any more of those :( oh well.

Indy-mation 2

I talked with the guy I bought the Indy from and he's sending me guts from another system to see if that fixes the Irix install problem.  I tried loading it off the DVD-ROM I got and it's a no go, so hopefully this new equipment works.

I picked up an original SCSI DVD-RAM but I need a terminator for it, my HP machines seem to not like it without a terminator although my Octane2 seemed fine with it (although couldn't access it, probably the filesystem).

On another note, I got an ESP MH-307 on ebay! ^O^ it should be awesome, I picked up an EMG 707 at guitar center for it as well :D  I took out the pickups in my ESP Maverick in preparation for the LWHMET's arrival, guy finally got the things sent out to me, geez.  So this upcoming week should be pretty exciting.

Indy-mation

I acquired an SGI Indy from a guy over at nekochan. It seems to work great except when I try to netboot the install for Irix it freezes when loading the miniroot...so I haven't done much other than try installing Irix about 10 times...bah.

I got my Octane2 working, though! It's sweet...except for the fact that the graphics suck lol, thanks a lot SGI for your fail-tacular V6 and V8 graphics. I'll have to get one of the older ones or a V10/V12 sometime (LOL).

I've been wanting to get some new jeans and some pants. Been looking on alloy, etc. but soo pricey! lol I'm a cheapass when it comes to non-computer stuff.

New Term!

Whooo!!! Last classes are finally over! ^O^ augh those classes were painful, haha. Anyway on to my new term!

Anyway! I have an ESP Maverick heading my way!!! :O yeah I know, awesome huh?! It's a black one (boo) with a maple fretboard (yay!) so I'm excited about getting it. I'm going to try to get a decal for the headstock so I can refinish it ;) because the finish isn't the best on it the guy said so I'll have to repaint it. Plus I can make it a fun colour!! I'm thinking purple, that would really be awesome with the maple, but I dunno it might end up something totally different.

I have slightly under $350 in my paypal account so I need to fortify that amount in order to buy that IBM I was talking about a bit ago. I got all excited when I went to their site and saw a free shipping on the used stuff then I noticed it was on "PCs" and of course I want something in the "UNIX Servers" section :gonk: oh well haha.


I got the 4-button (and final non-wheel) Mouseman the other day, it turns out that it's got a PS/2 connector! How weird is that, I would have thought it was USB as my Mouseman+ was...oh well. Anyway the middle button and thumb button register the same event in xev! how lame is that? Oh well it was a good mouse to get anyhow. It's kind of sun colours and is grey with a purple grip.

HHKP Lite & Logitech Mouseman

Another one of my millions of eBay purchases, I got a PFU Happy Hacking Keyboard Lite, the original Lite model without the arrow keys, and the 2nd generation of the Logitech Mouseman, the one with the thumb indentation. I have the 3rd generation one coming to me as well but it hasn't arrived yet. The 3rd is the final generation imo, they kept the name going for one mouse without naming the wheel. The Cordless Mouseman Optical is this mouse and a disgrace to the Mouseman name, it fails so bad it's incomprehensible why they tarnished the name with it. Anyway, the 3rd gen Mouseman Wheel and 4th gen Mouseman Wheel (the blue one) are great and pretty much the best ergonomic mice ever.

Well the HHKB is cool, the membrane under the keys is the same as the SGI USB keyboards so they are pretty nice. The keys and "stalk" under them are one piece on this one whereas they are 2 pieces on the SGI ones (removable keys). The action is better on the SGI and the control key sticks a bit on the HHKB.

The Mouseman is as I remember, very comfortable and perfect to use. I wish it had a scroll wheel in-between the index and middle finger buttons but oh well :P I think I might try to mod one in there sometime...>__>

This guy has the Wingman mouse which I've been wanting to get forever, I don't even remember if there was a difference, but who doesn't want a grey mouse with a black cable?

IBM Power Intellistation 275

I noticed that IBM has a 2x1.45GHz Power4 Intellistation in their used section for $700 with a 20" monitor. That's pretty cheap considering the price IBM charges for brand-new ones. A quick move over to the 285 page gets you $9000 for a 2 processor model (in this case 1 processor, 2 cores vs the 275's 2 physical processors). It also has a Spaceball and sound card, oooh the sound card makes it all worth it!

Well if you're looking for a cheap Unix workstation this would be a steal, it's almost better than that $600 SGI Octane2 I missed out on earlier this year. IBM charges $1900 for the GXT6500 graphics card it has by itself! Amazing, you could get two of the workstation and combine them to have 8GB of ram 2xHDD and 2xGraphics for less than the price of one of those cards.

Sun keys and xmodmap

I've tried to get my extra sun keys on this keyboard to work, but apparently you can't make them do 2 key combinations, say "^c" or something like that, oh well.

Anyway I've bound the @ and \ keys as copy and undo respectively because the altgr key on the sun keyboard is the rightmost one on the bottom row.


I tried to remap the backspace key to backslash/pipe key and that works great! Unfortunately remapping that key to the backspace fails miserably. No matter whether I bind it as less or greater it puts less, and there is no altgr functionality so bleh. Same unusefulness goes on with the tilde and escape key swapping. I guess somethings were just never meant to be, at least I'm used to those key positions and use them more often anyway, just thought it'd be cool to get the sun layout going on with my laptop. sigh


*I use the french canadian keyboard so it's the <> key, coincidentally the #|\ key is moved from the leftmost to the rightmost on the sun layout, heh.

eBay

I've bought way too much stuff on ebay lately...I bought a Compaq rackmount which turns on but it gives me a long beep no idea what it means...even after reading all the Compaq manuals.  I stuck the processors in my other rackmount and put the ram in my mom's pc so the money I paid for it was about what it would cost for those anyway.  I also got a processor and 2 hard drives from the guy and those both work well.

I ordered an old Logitech Mouseman as well, the good one with 3 buttons and the thumb indentation.  Ah and an original Happy Hacking Lite keyboard, they are cool =3

and as a side note I've switched my right windows/super key to be my compose key, so I can type things like est-tset and thorn really easily (ß and þ respectively) in addition to my accent keys from the canadian french layout.  go français! lol. >__>;

July

Yesterday we went out to IHOP and I got some regular pancakes and didn't finish them, lol, way too much food for me. Anyway I got some SGI O2s from my friend the other day and turns out one of them is a goner. The chassis is fine but the board/cpu is borked (solid amber LED of d00m).

So I'm trying to get the IRIX 6.5 discs, etc. so I can put a newer OS on it as 6.3 kinda limits us. I cannibalized the ram and now the "good" 180MHz one has 256MB of ram.


I started up 2 new classes this past week. Nothing is really exciting at all, one dude doesn't want us going online with our laptops. As long as he keeps it interesting I wouldn't really mind much.

Next Blog

Been using the Next Blog button quite a bit lately, I found a guy's page today who listens to Shai Hulud.  Anyway he has some nice pics: http://edwardjamesphoto.blogspot.com/

Colours and such

I need to figure out how to change it ><;  The green is nice but I'd rather have some other colours, you know.

fun times

So basically when I was searching for pics of this guy in a movie I found a blog a woman does about her 2 daughters. Anyway I read the whole thing last night and tonight xP haha.


Here it is: http://alicesair.blogspot.com/

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POSTING!!!!