Money is the bane of my existence...
1) I've been laid up by... well... something. Something annoying and icky and nasty. I'm drinking lots of fluids, taking it easy on myself.
2) I haven't gotten a call from La-Z-Boy. Assuming my mother isn't simply nuking the relevant messages, I probably didn't qualify for jack shit. Lowe's doesn't seem to be a good prospect, either. I dunno what I *do* qualify for.
3) With the demise of my second computer, I guess it's time to pull my ancient 1GB out and see if it still works. It usually does. I'm going to need one of several things:
* A new computer. This isn't in the cards at all, until I start working.
* A new or at least used and functional PATA drive. If I had a little money, I'd just get a 250GB SATA drive and controller card and be done with it, but I don't.
* A 44->40-pin+power cable and mounting rails. I've got two 40GB laptop drives - one working and in an enclosure, and one that's of dubious reliability. The working drive needs backing up and wiping - it was running Linux on a PowerPC machine, so the partition table isn't bootable. I can install Linux on the unreliable drive, copy everything over, reformat, copy everything back, and switch the two drives around.
* Press the Sun E250 back into service. It's an old server of mine - it kicks out a lot of heat, and the framebuffer's a pile of crap, and the Gentoo install on there hasn't been updated in a year. If I had money to kick in for the power bill, this would even be a viable option. Then again, it doesn't use as much power on its own as my mother thinks - it's *cooling* the damn thing that drives up the power bill. In winter, though? It doesn't matter, or it won't matter in a month or two - by then, it'll be so cold that the E250 would end up being more efficient than trying to heat the upstairs with our antiquated furnace/AC setup.
(When things are in working order, I try to keep two systems running - a Linux machine for day-to-day work, and a Windows machine so I can play games (since my video card sucks in Linux). Without it, I can't check my e-mail or use IM services or IRC, or at least it's cumbersome and I rather like being able to have my Linux box always available to check in with people while I'm busy playing games or flopped on my bed.)
2) I haven't gotten a call from La-Z-Boy. Assuming my mother isn't simply nuking the relevant messages, I probably didn't qualify for jack shit. Lowe's doesn't seem to be a good prospect, either. I dunno what I *do* qualify for.
3) With the demise of my second computer, I guess it's time to pull my ancient 1GB out and see if it still works. It usually does. I'm going to need one of several things:
* A new computer. This isn't in the cards at all, until I start working.
* A new or at least used and functional PATA drive. If I had a little money, I'd just get a 250GB SATA drive and controller card and be done with it, but I don't.
* A 44->40-pin+power cable and mounting rails. I've got two 40GB laptop drives - one working and in an enclosure, and one that's of dubious reliability. The working drive needs backing up and wiping - it was running Linux on a PowerPC machine, so the partition table isn't bootable. I can install Linux on the unreliable drive, copy everything over, reformat, copy everything back, and switch the two drives around.
* Press the Sun E250 back into service. It's an old server of mine - it kicks out a lot of heat, and the framebuffer's a pile of crap, and the Gentoo install on there hasn't been updated in a year. If I had money to kick in for the power bill, this would even be a viable option. Then again, it doesn't use as much power on its own as my mother thinks - it's *cooling* the damn thing that drives up the power bill. In winter, though? It doesn't matter, or it won't matter in a month or two - by then, it'll be so cold that the E250 would end up being more efficient than trying to heat the upstairs with our antiquated furnace/AC setup.
(When things are in working order, I try to keep two systems running - a Linux machine for day-to-day work, and a Windows machine so I can play games (since my video card sucks in Linux). Without it, I can't check my e-mail or use IM services or IRC, or at least it's cumbersome and I rather like being able to have my Linux box always available to check in with people while I'm busy playing games or flopped on my bed.)