I think it speaks for itself.

You know, "handwriting on the wall" might have been a better title for this blog.

Yesterday kazekage continued to crash unpredictably (twice in the middle of work) despite numerous tweaks to the kernel command line and several recompiles.

I think I've got it fixed, but who can tell? It ran for 24 hours yesterday without crashing, then crashed every 2 or so for a while. The IDE cable (which has now been thrown out) was probably not bad, but the one I'm using now is 40-pin, so I need to get a new one.

Also, while Ying was driving my car yesterday, the right rear tire blew out, fomenting yet another unexpected expense and inconvenience. At least she got it the tune-up that it needed.

kazekage in action.



("kazekage" means "wind shadow" - the character is the kanji for "wind", located appropriately enough above the air intake.)

So, the KVM appears to be not a total disaster. got a 2-port as well. When I first set it up the ghosting was so bad that my monitor couldn't autoconfigure, but some jiggering with the cables and monitor settings got it to acceptable parameters. It just so happens I had gold-plated monitor cables in reserve which fit the requirements of the new switch (M2M) and enough type-A USB connectors to get up and running. The gold-plated cables seem to produce visibly superior results to my old KVM, even though this is not such a well-reviewed one.

That's my theme for today: no total disasters. I think it's working out.

(By the way, did I mention that did a cool little case detail for me? I'll update with a photo later.)

I just moved my office out into the common area in the apartment. Now ying and I can work at the same time without constantly bumping into each other every time we turn our respective chairs.

Of course, nothing is allowed to go well right now, so my KVM switch broke in a completely inscruitable way as soon as I was finished moving things. Also, the cheapo network card I bought because the nvnet driver would have been a hassle turned out to be an 8139D rather than a normal, working, 8139C. This despite no external difference on the packaging since the last card that bought. She was nice enough to lend me her network card for the interim, so I am now posting this from the newly-reborn "kazekage". (For those of you following along in the book: the last machine's name was "orochimaru".)

Luckily the new, optimized network setup works just fine: I took out my old 10/100 switch so that I can transfer files between machines again at full speed. When we get tandem ('s desktop machine) hooked up to the network again, we should be able to effortlessly send anime episodes to each other.

Tomorrow I will try to pick up a new KVM, since VoIP is on windows, pairing tools are on MacOS, and development is painfully slow on everything but linux. Hopefully with the additional purchase (exchange, really) of the network card for 's machine, that will be the end of technology-related disasters for the moment.

Generally things are going great though. The apartment is really starting to be livable. There was actually enough room in the living room for me to move my workspace in there, which is saying