2005-01-05-1950Z


Just picked up an old computer at the Rosarito Red Cross thrift store. It's got an apparently-bad hard drive, a 52x CD-ROM drive, a 3.5" floppy drive; video, USB, soundblaster or somesuch, and serial/parallel connectors. All for $100 pesos, or about US$9.00. They even threw in the book I wanted, Glory, which if I get around to reading it will be my first Nabokov.

Now I can hook this up to the monitor someone threw out a couple of weeks or so ago, but it complains "no sync signal". Gotta find the pinout for these suckers and see where the problem is. It does the same when hooked to the video out on my laptop, so I assume the problem is in the monitor and not the two computers.

At Waldo's they sell these little chocolate candies with pecans, "not recommended for children" because they have 1.5% alcohol in them! Damn, are they good. Hope they don't realize I'm a 48-year-old kid or they won't sell them to me any more.

I'm getting ready to start composting (my) human waste. I hate using the sewer system here when I know it's mostly being dumped raw into the Pacific. No, I'm not going to buy one of those overpriced Envirolets. I've just got to find a source for sawdust or wood chips, which are supposed to neutralize the smell, and get a 50-gallon plastic drum for the long-term composting. I bought a small 5-gallons-or-so bucket for the day-to-day business. Compost it for a year with other vegetable matter, and it should be safe for use on a garden. Of course, I'll need to get a second 50-gallon drum after a while so I can rotate.

I never did get alyce and billy to shut down. They are probably going to need the apm module, which I didn't allow for in the config. I tried just building the module, but wouldn't you know it, I get the famous "Unresolved symbols" error when attempting to depmod. Damndiddydamndamn. I just know I'm going to be all day fixing problems if I recompile the kernel. The goddamned system is too fragile.

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