All Things Yummy

First of all, my parents are back! Everything seems okay.

Anyway, just finished second hump of the exam period with ECE316 and ECE342 out of the way (making it 60th and 61th exam). Feels so long ago even though it was just this morning and yesterday morning… Bah! Studying for ECE316 seemed to have screwed up ECE342, we’ll see how the marks come out.

In the continuing line of computer problems, my computer finally went belly up with blue screen everywhere and refusing (for some reason) to run Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firebird. I ordered a new motherboard - ECS K75SA PRO - which was the cheapest motherboard that I could still use the old CPU and RAM in. I’ll be losing the RAID and the third memory bank, so I’ll have to figure out where to put the two extra harddrives and the extra 256MB memory stick. :p That reminds me, I need to send in the IBM DeathStar to get another DeathStar back. To add to this, during yesterday’s thunderstorm, lightning hit near here and the Linksys router finally went down, crashing every 3 to 4 hours requiring a cold reset. I’ve replaced it with the NetGear RP114 that I had around, so all-important Internet Access is not lost.

One interesting thing - I built my computer around November 2000. It means the computer is almost 3 years old but I really don’t feel any overwhelming need to upgrade since everything I do works more-or-less flawlessly. Granted, I don’t play mad 3D games but I was just looking around and 2GHz machines are selling for $500, $600! Of course, 3 years in Computer Engineering has taught me that the clock speed isn’t everything. Since the NetGear router (I believe) has SNMP support, I’m gonna see if I can put up a Linux machine and put MRTG on it… and maybe use it as a fileserver with the extra harddrives… or something. Bah, I get all these urges to do stuff especially when I’m busy.

Oh yeah, heh, I realized that my centralized mailing scheme hasn’t been working quite correctly - my server automatically checks different pop3 accounts and pools it into one server (and runs it through SpamAssassin!) but earlier today, I realized one of the accounts hadn’t been checked for about 10 days. I manually log in to find 1500+ email messages, of which about 5 were valid emails (From a mailing list), 1 from the online store where I bought the motherboard from, mixed in with 1500 SPAM! That’s less tha half a percent…. blah…