old computer happiness

Those who have read me for a while may recall that I lamented the passing of the usefulness of my 486 due to a lack of video capability (that is, error beeps meaning it could not address display memory). I was concerned this might have been the motherboard and not the video card itself, but tonight it was pretty much conclusively proven to be the Kelvin board by switching in the previous Trident TVGA board, which happily worked fine. We reseated the chips on the Kelvin that weren't sottered in, to no avail, so I'm pretty sure that's the component that's toast, although it's theoretically possible it could be the VESA circuits on the motherboard (we don't have any other VESA cards lying around with which to test this). In any case, it is now usable again, except that Windows (3.1!) won't run because a driver it's trying to load doesn't do what it wants it to do (we assume this is some Kelvin driver, to which of course the Trident goes "huh?"), but since I have nothing on that computer I want to run under windows (Word 2? Netscape 1.1? *laughs*) this is no problem.

Unfortunately, the spirograph program I was originally looking for when I lamented being unable to get the computer to usefully boot some months ago wasn't even on the hard drive. :( I guess the disk for that is long-lost. I hope being able to play Menzoberranzan (which I can't seem to get to install under XP) and Loom (which I can't get to run and/or sync up the sound on the CD properly, despite trying to use ScummVM and such) will make up for it.

Also: A userpic that is actually a picture of me (sitting in front of the fireplace tonight)? Are those four horsemen I see on the horizon? (I liked this one better than when I colour-shifted it purple, but I've just noticed it clashes horribly with the colour scheme of my journal, so I may want to change it anyway.)

new sky photos

Couple of pics added to my site. The first one has already been posted in here but it didn't have a page on the site at the time. These open new windows (I think - I have Firefox set to direct "new window" to "current tab", heh.).

computer weirdness: the saga continues; apartments

Today my computer did the "no output, HD LED steady on" thing before even making it to POST. I think this pretty much rules out hard drive problems or Windows corruption and narrows it to the power supply or motherboard (BIOS possibly?). I am going to try attacking the power supply first since that's rather easier and certainly much cheaper to replace. :-/

In other news, I was checking out apartment rents in the area in the paper today and working out a cost-scenario for what it would be like to move out and live in my own place. It's not as dire as I've always projected it to be, but it rather does require either no savings (or a very trivial amount), or cutting my discretionary spending by huge amounts (as in, if I go to gathers, I get to spend no other money on anything ever). I have no idea if I would manage to balance that out in a satisfactory fashion, but really the more worrying problem is that I just don't know what is going on with my emigration, and therefore definitely would not want to get tied up in a one-year lease. I doubt if I would even want to do six months. And month-to-month is not common around here, and you generally don't like the surrounding area of the properties it is available on. And then there's the hassle of moving. Is privacy worth all that to me? I don't know. Really what I need is a renter's magazine so I can see places, because the classified ads (which I was using just to get a general sample) never have addresses in them.

soliciting entertainment

Tell me a "no shit, there I was..." story. I just ran across this phrase in an old email and I don't think I have any of my own, so listen me up one of yours.