Thursday started off interesting. Pathfinder, the name of the computer
I have video monitoring the cat stand, died. Time of death appears to
have been around about 11:02pm Wednesday evening, Pathfinder time (which
had fallen behind by as much as 10-30 minutes). I discovered it powered
off on Thursday morning because the whirling of PC fans hadn’t sounded
the same that morning.

What to do? It was almost 8am on Thursday morning and I decided I was
going to replace the power supply before I head off to work. How did I
know it was the power supply? Well, 2 weeks before hand there was the
stench of burnt electronics coming from the general area where
Pathfinder sits at. I had first suspected it was Endeavour, my Pentium
100Mhz Linux box, but oddly enough it was running fine. After about 5
minutes, I rounded up a flakey (due to motherboard/cache) AMD K6-2
300Mhz machine. I pulled its power supply out and 10 minutes later had
it installed in Pathfinder. Flipped the switch and Pathfinder resumed
where it left off at.

An interesting note about Pathfinder: It is an Intel 233Mhz machine
which isn’t anything special. But its running in the same chassis as my
first computer – an AMD 386DX 40Mhz machine (back then, 486SX 25Mhz
machines were “da bomb”). And from this first chassis I had upgraded to
a 486DX 40Mhz machine and then later to the Intel 233Mhz. The 3.5″
floppy drive is the original floppy drive that came with the 386 machine
and I think it still works (haven’t really had a need to use floppies
lately). This 233Mhz machine has a video tuner card installed and makes
one of the web cams possible.

In other news, I had my last calculus 1 quiz last night. I’m pretty
sure I passed it. I would LOVE to have gotten a perfect score on it.
But I had gotten stuck on a step in one of the problems. I think I
worked around it successfully, but I’m not sure.