One Piece at a time: Finis

We started our project with the case and we finished it with that one little random piece of cable that you almost always have to get. The project was smooth, but not so smooth as to be unsatisfying. Quite frankly it was kind of affirming when we got to the point where the cable wouldn't reach and I knew how to order the adapter.

Lydia, for her part, was a trooper and a good sport. She didn't pout when we couldn't finish right away. Her enthusiasm when the various parcels arrived carried me along in the evenings when I was tired.

Now it is done.

We installed the last part, the piece of cable, and installed Windows 7 on it. It is up and connected to our wireless network. I then connected it to our Windows Home Server and the network printer. After Lydia polices up the area around her desk, I will let her have some speakers and we can install iTunes on it, and then we can begin the process of migrating her music over, which was the main purpose of this upgrade.

I now begin to think about my next project. Maybe a Media Server for the Family Room, maybe refurbishing Lydia's now former laptop into another Ubuntu box. I don't know,

What I do know is that I loved this project and a little girl's smile is priceless.

One piece at a time: Parts 7 & 8

Last Tuesday the WiFi card, memory, and optical drive arrived. Lydia charmed me into spending another evening at work, installing parts in her computer. The memory went in first. I am letting her do as much of the installation as I can. A big part of this exercise is confidence building. The innards of a computer will not be scary to her after this is over, much as the innards of a chicken were no longer scary to me after the first time I cut one up.

Less goo with the computer though.

Pushing in the memory cards required a bit more pressure than she was capable of, so I did it. Click click, your in. Then came the WiFi card. Here we met a problem that required more than pressure. PCI cards like this have a piece of metal that is supposed to slide into the back and keep the dust out. As this is a small case, the piece of metal was too long. There was no getting it to fit. I was afraid we were going to have to use a USB wireless adapter which would've done the job, but I didn't want to waste a USB port.

Lydia had the answer.

"Dad," she said, "couldn't you just take that metal thing off with the screw driver?"

Indeed there were two screws there that were easily removed. I took them off and it fits fine.

Then came the interesting discovery. Both the optical drive and the hard drive are SATA drives. SATA drives require special power connectors. The power supply that came with this case had exactly two of these, presumably one for the hard drive and one for the optical drive. My discovery is that there is no way these could both be plugged-in at the same time. There simply isn't enough wire between them. Connecting them is physically impossible without positing the existence of wormholes.

Fortunately, there is a fix. An adapter that is a SATA power cable can be bought for a couple of bucks.

As soon as that adapter gets here, we will be ready to install, so we will need a monitor. A brilliant idea occurred to me. I could give her my old 17-inch monitor and I could buy a cheap one for myself.

I am so thoughtful.

One Piece at a time: Parts 4, 5, and 6

Once the motherboard is installed, as Lydia and I did on March 1, it is then possible to install everything else. This is where the "delay of gratification" thing becomes difficult for me. This is especially true when you know the remaining parts are not all that expensive even in the aggregate.

At this point we have the motherboard and the hard drive installed. In order to be a computer, this is actually all that is required, but most of us want a little more and there are technical issues. By technical issues, I mean that your are going to have to install the operating system in some way. I understand this can be done from a thumb drive if your BIOS is robust enough. As I have worked with this motherboard before, I know this is not the case. That means that an optical drive (CD, DVD, or blu-ray) will be required. I am not quite ready to play with the new technology of the blu-ray, so I decided to go DVD. As one of Lydia's heart-desires is to use this with her iPod, you have to figure this drive will be used even after the operating system is installed.

Oh, yeah, I guess the computer isn't exactly ready to run because it has no memory. On my itty-bitty Ubuntu box, I only used one gigabyte of memory. That only cost me $20. I couldn't find such a deal this time. In choosing memory, you have to be careful to get something that works with the motherboard. There are two things to look for. The first of these is the basic type DDR, DDR2, DDR3. As near as I have been able to figure, the speed and cost go up with the number after the R. Our motherboard requires DDR2 memory. There is more to it than this, however, as you also have to look at the speed of the memory. Our motherboard can handle either 667 or 800 speed memory. This lead me to the choice of memory made by Crucial. Crucial is a common brand and has a good reputation.

The final thing at this point is the connection to the Internet. This will be done from Lydia's room that doesn't have an Ethernet connection in it. Therefore she will need a wireless card that did not come on the motherboard. The motherboard does have one PCI expansion slot however so I have invested in a wireless PCI card. I'm a little worried about this for a couple of reasons. The inside of the computer is very small. Will it even fit? But more importantly, Newegg is trying to sell an extended warrantee on this for $7. It would have to have about a 1/3 chance of failure for this to make economic sense to me, but it is a great source of profit to them, no doubt.

In any case, the die is cast and those parts are ordered. Lydia is getting exited as she has already started bugging her big sister for her old monitor.

One piece at a time: Interlude

Lydia has been anxious to start putting things together since the hard drive arrived. I'd told her we couldn't put anything together until the motherboard arrived. Well, we got it on Tuesday, so on Tuesday evening after supper instead of watching NCIS I was working on a computer with my twelve-year-old daughter.

I am going to say now that it was a good experience that I wouldn't trade for anything. I want to say it up front because some of what comes later might sound like complaining. For instance, when I mention the fact that there is a reason I when I choose my own time to work on a computer it is 8:00AM on Saturday morning when I am fresh as opposed to Tuesday at 7pm. (For some reason Tuesdays are a tiring day for me. I don't know why.)

While I was finishing up some other chores, Lydia and her mom prepared the kitchen table as a workspace. When I arrived, I had her bring one of our cereal bowls as a place to hold the screws. This is very important. I've spent more time looking for screws than any other part of the process, but the solution is easy: have a place for them.

The first part of the operation was opening the case. This is a nicely designed case, so the rule of thumb in opening is that it will be easy...if you think. And it was. The entire case is just a marvel of design. There is not a cubic inch of unused space.

Once it was open and we had cleared out the case, we began the process of installing the motherboard. It was at this point I made an important discovery. Lydia is good help. She does what she is told and she thinks. And she has thin, long fingers that will fit into these small form-factor cases.

She attached the motherboard, and attached the cables, but I had to figure out what cables went where.



I have entered the age of bifocals, but have made the discovery that they made certain print very clear but very small. To light a candle rather than curse the darkness, I have purchased a magnifying glass with a light as part of my tool kit. It is great in reading motherboard diagrams. The diagrams and connections are all straight forward except for the front-panel, but Lydia's young eyes and thin, long fingers were useful again.

Once the motherboard was in with the cables attached, we proceeded with the hard drive, whose bay was cleverly tucked away.

We then closed it up and are waiting for the next round of parts.

One piece at a time: Parts 2 and 3

One of the basic pieces of the computer, of course, is the storage. This has manifested itself in a number of different ways across time. The first computer I ever had use of was a TRS-80 that was bought by McLish School back in the late 1970s. Originally, its storage was just the RAM. You keyed in the program and if you kicked the plug out of the wall you lost it. Eventually, we used a cassette to save programs on. In order to put more than one program on, you had to listen to the sound on the tape, which was not unlike listening to a fax machine, and wait for a gap. Once David Stewart, who was in the grade below me, didn't leave enough of a gap between his program and mine and I lost the end of one. It didn't bother me; it's not like I've remembered it for 35 years or anything.

Then came the five-and-a-quarter-inch floppies and then the three-and-a-half. I am leaving out a few details like the double-sided, double-density disks, but the point is we've gone through some changes on storage technology.

Last Saturday, I ordered the hard drive for my twelve-year-old daughter's computer. You can look at it here. It is a one terabyte drive. Let's get some perspective on this. That TRS-80 held 4 kilobytes before it was upgraded. Those three-and-a-half-inch floppies that were just the cat's whiskers when they first came out were one megabyte disks. My first serious computer had a 320 megabyte hard rive. At some point, we started talking in gigabytes. Now this is a terabyte drive. So we have a progression of units kilo, mega, giga, and tera. Usually, we talk about each of these steps being a factor of 1000, but it is really a factor of 1024 because the computer world works in powers of 2 and 2 to the tenth power is 1024.

The 1 terabyte drive I am getting for my daughter holds about a quarter of a billion times more information than that old TRS-80.

Damn.

Now, as I said, those three-and-a-quarter-inch floppies cost a buck back in the day. They held one one-millionth of what this one terabyte drive holds. It costs $60. That works out to $0.00006/megabyte. The growth in businesses offering to store your data in the Cloud makes sense in those terms. The disk space at least is practically free.

By way of contrast, I feel real richer when I say that if I'd bought this much storage on those floppies it would've cost $1,000,000. And that many floppies side by side would stretch half way from my house in Pittsburg, Kansas to Tulsa.

I had set out a one part a week pace, but Lydia had a hard day on Thursday so we rushed the process a bit and we bought her motherboard. I looked at all the deals taking cost versus utility into account again and bought this one. It was only as I was writing this up that I discovered this was exactly the same one I'd bought for my own itty-bitty box. This is quite affirming in its unconscious consistency, but it's kinds of disappointing as I was wanting to work with a different one.

In any case, this process has made me think about the future of computing. My desire over the years has always been for a bigger computer. I wonder if that is just a function of the fact that I started out working with such a small one that it wasn't useful. The desire for a larger computer was really a desire for a more useful computer.

Now we are in a more mature age where we use our computers as communication devices. It seems to me--and I claim no originality in this--that we are moving towards a day when storage will be largely on the Cloud and we will have small hand-held devices like our cell phones to interface with that cloud on a personal basis. I suppose those of us who do a lot of writing will want a keyboard and a big monitor, so there will be docking stations. Those who use computers for presentations will have a special sort of interface as well, but I've not thought about that as much.

One piece at a time: Part 1

After I built my itty-bitty Ubuntu box, I began to explore possibilities for this new design. For a user whose needs were modest, the smaller mini-ITX motherboard and associated smaller CPU were not a handicap. They were a right-size alternative to what "the man" wants to sell you.
I began to think of my middle-schooler whose computing needs (and I use that word in its pre-teen sense) are quite modest. She has my old iPod and the Smiley Virus (I mean Miley Cyrus) and the Justa Beaver CDs that she has ripped there unto. She has whatever Disney sites she likes to peruse. Then there is the school district's PowerSchool page. That is it.
She has been using her eldest sisters old laptop which is coughing up blood mucus and whose sclera have turn yellow. It is laying back upon a pillow and has taken on a preternatural glow.
The idea occurred to me that it would be fun for the two of us to build a computer for her. At this point it looks to me like her itty-bitty hands with those long, thin fingers would be quite useful inside a mini-ITX computer case.
Buying all of the pieces at once so soon after having built my first mini-ITX computer would put too much strain on my marriage and my credit card, and besides there is nothing like teaching about the delay of gratification--if I don't know about it at least my children should--so we decided to be like Johnny Cash and build it one piece at a time.
The first piece is the case. If you take a look at it I am sure you will agree that it fits my middle-schooler's personality. It arrived this week.

We will report on the rest of the pieces as they arrive.

My itty bitty Ubuntu Box

It was scary because it was all so easy. First I ordered the parts:

• the motherboard-CPU combo,
• the memory,
• the case, and
• the optical drive.

Then they all came just as they said they would. First the motherboard and the memory, then the case, and finally the optical drive. At the same time, I had been working with Ubuntu. I had downloaded it back when I was working on my Windows Home Server. It was there on the hard drive on my laptop. I first put it on a thumb drive just because the possibility of booting from a thumb drive seemed so cool to me. Then I burned it on a CD just in case the BIOS on the motherboard wasn't up to it.
Then came Saturday morning. I woke up having slept like the righteous dead at approximately 6:30. The computer was together by 8. I didn't shower, but I did shave; I did make coffee and eat breakfast. I did put the previous day's dishes in the dishwasher. (We'd had a plumbing emergency on Thursday with the dishwasher.)
The point is that it all went together like a puzzle.
The case is the size of a 4-slice toaster. Seriously. It is red and as cute as a button. The mini-ITX board with the Atom CPU is square and a smidgen over six-and-a-half inches on a side. It all plugged in nicely with the various wires: power, SATA cables, USB cables, and front panel wires. Having learned previously the hard way, I took great care with the front panel wires, but there was a nice, color-coded schematic that came along with the motherboard.
Then I put in the hard drive, which I'd bought last September at Wal-Mart, and then the optical drive. This is where the smallness of the case and the strength of the design came into play. It all fit easily. I did stop to think it out; this is something else I have learned. But it all fit.
I'd thought ahead to put the SATA cables on before I even thought about the drives. There would've been no way my huge hands could've gotten in there to put them on with a hard drive in the way. If I ever put more memory in, I will have to take both of the drives out. This is just how it is going to be.
Anyway, the process was somewhere between stacking toast and the second round of Jenga in complexity.
Then I install Ubuntu Linux.
I'd never done this before. I didn't know what to expect. I stuck in the CD, turned it on, and it booted to the optical drive. It began installing. At various points it stopped to ask questions. Once I thought it was stuck but I was patient and it continued. Then it came time for the final restart and it did stick at the BIOS screen. I figure that was more of a function of the BIOS than Linux, so I just turned it off and turned it back on. (Having screwed-up and restarted a lot has given me an inner calm that allows me to do stuff like that.) It worked.
It has now been about 24 hours and I am happy. Ubuntu Linux looks a lot like MacOS on the front-end. I might just be saying this because I am a PC user, but it is my opinion.
Some issues that I've discovered that might matter:

• it doesn't work with iTunes and
• it doesn't do Netflix.
  

These are things I've discovered as I am now contemplating building a machine like this for my youngest daughter. Her iPod and TV are very important to her.
All said, it was a nice couple of hours, but those who've been inspired should read earlier in the blog about the failures.

The Challenge of the itty-bitty computer

Having successfully upgraded my wife’s old computer into a Windows Home Server and then, buoyed by my success in that area, having gone on to build a Windows 7 computer for my mother-in-law, my heart was at ease. I had conquered worlds. I had learned new curse words, words which had, up until that point, only had a shadowy theoretical sort of existence. I had been a successful computer builder.

But as with the rich fool in Luke 12 verses 16 through 21, who said, “I will tear down my barns and build bigger ones,” I keep pushing for something more. My eyes kept sweeping over the web sites of New Egg, Geeks.com, and TigerDirect. I was looking for trouble. Seek and ye shall find, as the Good Book says.

It all begins with a motherboard. And I will continue calling them motherboards. Calling them System boards dehumanizes further an already technical field. The Big Motherboards are denoted by ATX. This hearkens back to the old AT computers if you are old enough to remember them. The ATX motherboard represents the first step forward from them. These boards are somewhat largish at 12 inches by 9.6 inches. The motherboard I removed from my mother-in-law’s old IBM was an ATX. A micro-ATX (mATX) motherboard at 9.6 inches square is smaller and easier to deal with.

Imagine my joy when I discovered the mini-ITX motherboard which is 6.7 inches square. Imagine my joy as well when I discovered that I could get it from New Egg along with a CPU for $69. Extend your imagination to unbounded possibilities by thinking what I might do if I also came upon a mini-ITX case with a power supply for $49.99. Then, and you are NOT going to believe this, imagine me finding one gigabyte of compatible memory for $19. Put this together with the knowledge that I have a leftover one terabyte SATA hard drive that is just setting around.

Yes, you are there aren’t you? You know what is going to happen. It’s like in the teen horror flick when the scantily clad teenagers are alone in the boat house. Not only will they get naked, not only will they have sex, but they will also be pinned together with a harpoon while their bodies are still entwined.

I ordered all of the parts immediately because who could imagine making any sort of computer that cheap, and this one will be so small and cute to boot.

The question that the experienced will ask at this point is obvious. It is so obvious not only do they know to ask it, they know the solution. The questions is: what about the operating system. You forgot to include it in your calculations. It is easy to do and any of the versions of Windows floating around will likely cost more than all of these parts put together. But this is the beautiful part. Ubuntu Linux is free. Furthermore, all of the cool young Geeks worship at the throne of Linux.

If I build an Ubuntu box, then I will be young like them. My hair will turn once again dark. The aching in my joints will go away.

The case for this is red by the way. It all becomes rather clear that this computer building mania I am going through is a mid-life crisis. Better a computer than a Corvette; better Ubuntu than a blond.

I will keep you posted as matters develop.

Death by driveway

My wife Jean and I shoveled our drive this morning. I’d never done this as a boy in Oklahoma as it didn’t snow very frequently and when it did snow it didn’t stay long. (Have I ever mentioned how much I liked that aspect of Oklahoma?) But Jean and I moved here, and whatever things were gained, and there were things gained to be sure, this was one of the things what was lost. It shows just a little bit more often and when it does it sticks around just a little bit longer. This change was enough along the axes of frequency and longevity that we needed to get snow shovels.

Yesterday Jean and I spent the bulk of the day in a successful effort to save the greenhouse over at our hobby house. Jean’s dad had used the house next door to us for storage and projects. One of those projects was a greenhouse made of clear plastic sheeting. When we went over yesterday to check it out, there was a foot of snow on it and it had already torn in one spot. We took an hour to get the snow off. We came back after lunch and another 4 inches had built up on it. We got that off. We came back just before supper and got the two inches that had accumulated off. Because of all that there was no time to shovel the drive. Of course that would’ve been useless anyway as it was, and as you have gathered, still snowing.

Fortunately the wise and merciful leadership at the university cancelled classes and closed nonessential services (me and Jean) today too. This enabled us to shovel the drive today. It took us from a little after 8AM to about 11:15 AM. The high temperature during this interval was 9 degrees. Now I know some of you who read this may have the urge to tell me that you have toiled longer at lower temperatures. Keep it to yourself. It will not make me like you; it will not impress me other than to make me think you are a one-upping little toad. Versteh?

Being who I am, I’ve done some calculations. There was about 15 inches on the drive. Less some places, more other. For the sake of a conservative estimate, let’s say it was an even foot. Let us also estimate that this melts into one inch of water. My drive is 90 feet long (Vern Morton told us we would regret such a long drive for just this reason) and 8 feet wide. Water has a density of 62.4 pounds per cubic foot. When you do all the math, this works out to 3744 pounds of water. Since we are friends, let’s call this two tons.

When we came in after this, I look off my toboggan cap, and my hair was soaking wet. I had sweated through my hair at 9 degrees Fahrenheit. At the same moment, I stepped on my daughter’s wet socks on the floor and they stuck to me, frozen. There was something about that moment. I realized I was at a state of being I had never achieved before.

The end of the mother-in-law board

As of my last blog entry, I was waxing philosophical having replaced every single part of my mother-in-laws computer but was feeling confident that putting in a heat sink for the CPU would be the coup de grace. It turns out that I was a tad optimistic—but only a tad.

Sunday afternoon, I installed the heat sink, powered-up, and it booted into BIOS. That wasn't quite as veni, vidi, vici as it sounds. To put in a heat sink, you have to put in the heat sink bracket. This requires removing the motherboard and reinstalling it. Fortunately, what was once an act of dark magic to me has become a piece of cake having done it repeatedly. Repetition is the mother of learning. I seem to have heard that somewhere.

But I booted it, it came up in BIOS, and it stayed there instead of turning itself off in a fit of pique. I then looked at the settings, pressed escape to exit like it told me to, and then—the bastard—told me to power-down and reset the jumper so I could boot for real. This was something of a disappointment in my new motherboard, as the ancient motherboard that I am running Windows Home Server on did not require a jumper reset to boot for real. Oh well.

Anyway, I did that, pressed the button on the DVD-ROM drive so that I could put in my Windows install disk, and nothing happened. Nada. Zip.

I came to the conclusion that my DVD-ROM drive was a dud, so I headed over to the Best Buy in Joplin today to get another one. The cheapest they had was over $50.

As we teach our children, "Just say no!"

You can get them for under $20 on the Internet. I will pay a few dollars for convenience, but I decided I could wait a week for $30.

In the meantime, I'd been thinking. I've always been taught never to force anything. This is a good idea in general, but I began to wonder whether in plugging in my power lead on the DVD-ROM I hadn't been firm enough. I went back to my mother-in-law's today and reinstalled the DVD-ROM, this time being a little more firm.

To spare you my rendition of Also Sprach Zarathustra, let me just say that my mother-in-law has her computer up and running again. The power cord is the only part that is the same, but hey, it works.

The Computer of Theseus

Having been buoyed by my success in making a Windows Home Server, I embarked upon a project to fix my mother-in-law's computer. Before I proceed too much farther, I ought to say that my mother-in-law had never asked me to do this. Indeed, quite the reverse. The computer was "working fine" she said. Clearly, she was just in denial. The computer was several years old. How could it possibly still be working in a satisfactory manner?

So I bullied her into allowing me to fix it. All I needed to do was replace the motherboard--and the CPU. I already had both of these left over from another project. It wouldn't cost a thing.

Then I opened her case. It was a genuine IBM. It was an old computer of mine. At some point, I'd treated myself to an IBM just for the bragging rights. This was before IBM got out of the PC market entirely. The case was nice. So nice it took me 15 minutes to figure out how to open it. This is one thing I've discovered: no two computer cases open in exactly the same way. The engineers apparently take delight in finding clever ways to keep end-users from getting the machine open. You have to proceed with the idea that opening will be easy—once you figure out how to do it.

Once the case was open, I began to feel fear. In making my home server, I'd worked with my wife's Dell which was new (a Celeron/Pentium 4) relative to this IBM Pentium II. My wife's Dell had a smaller motherboard. It was a micro-ATX (mATX) as opposed to the full-blown ATX sitting in the IBM. The IBM had a little fan in a special slot and pointed directly at the IBM's CPU. There were scads of wires running everywhere. One thing that I've learned in this new hobby is not to be daunted by the profusion of wires. The inside of a computer are composed of a relatively small number of pieces and these can be dealt with one at a time.

I began taking the pieces out a few at a time. I removed the PCI cards, the CPU fan, and the memory. Then I removed the motherboard. I put in the new motherboard and its new memory. The PCI cards I'd removed had been for a modem and an Ethernet card. My mother-in-law is on DSL, so she doesn't need the modem, and the new motherboard has an Ethernet card on it, so neither of those cards was needed.

The next step was attaching the wires to the motherboard. These come in three types: power cables from the power supply, hard drive cables, and front panel wires.

It is here that I want to make a digression in order to transmit a discovery of mine. This is in regard to the front panel wires. These wires have a number of separate functions. They connect to the hard drive LED on the front panel of the computer to tell you if the hard drive is working; they connect to the reset switch what allows you to reset the computer; and most importantly they hook you to the on-switch. I'd discovered while turning my wife's computer into a home server that the on-switch (the power switch) is the only one of these you really have to have. My discovery is there is no universally accepted way for these to be configured. On the newer motherboards I'd looked at, there was a single front-panel block on the motherboard. On this ancient IBM, the plugs were scattered from hell to breakfast. Furthermore, one of these wires which was a three-prong on the old motherboard had mutated to a two-prong on the new one. This change caused me to spend $21 on replacement front panel wires which were, ultimately, not needed.

Having bought the new wires and hooked the new motherboard up, I turned it on. Nothing happened. The fan didn't come on; the hard drive didn't whir to life; the setup screen did not popup on the monitor.

Rather than admit defeat to my mother-in-law, I read the manual to my motherboard. On it, I found a place giving an explicit warning that the motherboard wouldn't boot with a standard ATX power supply. It required an ATX12v power supply. I didn't know what kind of power supply the old IBM had in it, but I had hope that it wasn't the ATX12v required. The answer at this point was to purchase such a power supply, but this raised a question as well: would the new power supply fit the old box? I chose to cut to the chase and get a new case at the same time.

I did this. When the new case and power supply arrived, I installed the power supply in the case and then went over to my mother-in-law's house. I then moved the motherboard, memory, and hard drive over to the new case. At that point, the only piece of the original computer left was the hard drive.

With everything installed, I turned the machine on. The fan started spinning, the hard drive started whirring, and the setup screen popped to life on the monitor. My heart soared like a hawk.

Then there was a series of beeps and it turned itself off. I turned it on and watched closely. It did the same thing.

At this point, I replace the old IDE hard drive with a new SATA hard drive, thinking the old hard drive might be too old for the motherboard. (The hard drive was jumpered in a way that was odd to me.) I turned it on again; same thing.

I did, however, note that there was a message on the screen stating that the previous time the computer had been shut down it was because of a "thermal event." I've ordered a heat-sink and a fan for the CPU.

I am, after all of this, in a philosophical mood. This reminds me of the philosophical question on the ship of Theseus. Theseus has a ship. As the planks rotted, they were replaced. After all of the planks had been replaced, is this still the same ship?

Like a vapor

Whereas ye know not what shall be on the morrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away. James 4:14

When we die, we are put into a box that is put into the ground, and, though we try to extend the period of time it takes through embalming, caskets, vaults and what have you, our substance is taken back into nature, into the system. The stuff of our dead body eventually will go into other living things.

This view, however, gives too much weight to our last moments. All of our lives we are taking in new matter and sloughing off old. We are like the dust-devils you see on a hot day. Dust comes in; dust goes out.

We are not the dust; we are something more. As with the dust devil, the dust goes in and the dust goes out, but the whirl is the thing that we are.

We take in more than the food we eat. We have people come into ourselves: friends, lovers, spouses, and, for those of us who are lucky, all three in the same person.

And more than dust goes out of us. We give birth to children; we make friends; we teach; we repair lives; we give love.

We enter into the circle of the world.

We are like a drop of water going into the pond. We blend with the water, but the ripples go out.

Some make a ripple on the ocean and some in a crawdad hole. It’s all the same just at a different scale.

And when we die, it leaves a hole in the center of the ripple. And the hole is a wound. And the wound is painful to those who’ve been in our circle. And the pain will remain until they’ve come to join us.

Ona Mae Winters, April 5 1925 through January 1,2011.

Windows Home Server and certain aspects of my personality made clear

It all began with a close call with a mini-potato cannon back in late August. The weather was hot, I was getting closer to fifty, and I was bored. I'd grasped the rudiments of the design of the potato cannon and was beginning to experiment. I discovered you could reduce the size of the combustion chamber, but that doing so reduced the muzzle velocity. I then discovered you could compensate for the reduced velocity by shrinking the size of the barrel, but in shrinking the barrel resulted in a minor explosion. I took this as a wake-up call, paused, and took stock.

What I needed was a hobby, a hobby appropriate for a man of my station. That is to say professor of mathematics, university administrator, and a man intent on taking a full set of eyebrows with him to the grave. I needed something that was challenging, made use of my hands, and produced a useful product. I needed something what didn't require me to work with combustibles. I thought about it.

Then one day while surfing the Internet as I am wont to do, I came upon the following article: "You can make a Windows Home Server." According to the article it would be easy. Putting together computers these days are like popping together tinker toys. And once the computer was built, the story said, I would be able to easily install Windows Home Server on it in a snap.

And why would I want a computer with Windows Home Server installed on it, you may ask. Well, the article had an answer for that too. If you have multiple computers in your home, which I do, then you can use the home server to back them all up. What could be cooler than that?

Well, a lot of things I guess, but it was enough for me.

And so, I began my project. If I were to relate it completely, I would tell about a side road I took where I attempted to build a computer from the ground up from a kit, but that didn't work out. No doubt I will do such at some point in the future, so let us concentrate on my refurbishment of my wife's old computer.

I'd bought my wife's computer for the use of the family when the eldest of our children entered high school. As that child graduated from college this last spring, one might discern that this machine is over eight years old. If it were a child, it would only have been in the second grade, but as a computer it belonged in a nursing home. I could get all technical on you now, but the truth of the matter is that software, in the manner of the built-in obsolescence that drives our economy and keeps us in gadget money, had marched past it. It wouldn't run the stuff that my daughters found to be cool any more. (It is kind of like me in that respect, but then I've been turned into a server too.)

Regardless of these short-comings, it still had the specs—on paper at least—of running Windows Home Server. Those who are alert should note the use of 'running' in that sentence. It would be able to run Windows Home Server, but, the point of Windows Home Server is to support a lot of hard disk space and the machine in question sported only an 80 gigabyte hard drive.

I would be remiss if I did not digress for a moment about how strange it is to be saying "only" 80 gigabytes. When I started playing with computers on a TRS-80 computer made by Radio Shack, we didn't know from hard drives. We used cassette tapes. The only people in school who knew about computers were me and a boy named Sparky in the grade below me and one day he accidentally wrote over the end of my program on the cassette. I've forgiven him for it; really. But the first hard drive I ever saw advertised cost $600 and was 20 megabytes. (Recall giga means times a billion and mega means times a million.) My first computer that had a hard drive in it proudly supported a 320 megabyte hard drive. That is about one-third of a gigabyte for those not used to the math.

So, you get the point, it seems strange to me to be referring to "only" 80 gigabytes.

When I first made my decision to refurbish, I took a trip to Wal-Mart and bought a one terabyte drive. As I said, mega equals times a million, giga equals times a billion, but tera equals times a trillion. I got this monster of a drive home, cracked open my computer case to put it in, and made a discovery. During the time since my wife's computer had been built, not only had hard disks been increasing in size. They'd been shifting their paradigm. That is to say, the way that they plug into the computer has changed.

Let me pause from discussing hard drives for a moment and spend some time discussion a topic we may have a chance to revisit: the Motherboard. The Motherboard is the center of the computer. It takes care of everything. That is why it is called the Motherboard. I've seen some sources trying to call it the System board. I think this is part of a conspiracy by enemies of humanity who want to dehumanize every aspect of language, but then I am considered strange.

In any case, the Motherboard runs the computer. It has all sorts of plugs on it that you can plug the devices that constitute the computer into. For the purpose of this narrative, suffice it to say that anything you plug into a computer, you plug into the Motherboard.

Back in the day when my wife's computer was new IDE hard drives were the cat's meow. They plugged into the Motherboard with impressive looking ribbon- cables that were a couple of inches wide and hooked into a plug that had 40 pins sticking up. It was a scary looking son of a gun, let me tell you. Engineers, being the kind of people they are—few people skills but decent blokes with a love of making things easier but not always realizing that easy to them is not necessarily easy to us—eventually figured-out that those wide, impressive looking cables where a five-letter word for female dog to work with and fixed it. In doing so, they shifted the paradigm from IDE drives to SATA drives. SATA drives have a larger storage capacity than IDE drives, but—and this is the important part to the story—do not plug in to the same plugs.

My Wal-Mart drive was useless to me.

But, don't despair, I am not that easy to deter. You see, it was at this point, I embarked on a false trail that added immensely to my knowledge of computers.

Having been following computers since the days of the TRS-80 and having seen many paradigm shifts in that interval, I have learned that most of the time those loveable engineers will provide a way to bridge the gap. It was at that point that I began looking for a SATA controller on a PCI card.

Ah ha, a new character has entered the stage. What, you ask, is a PCI card? It was realized at some point that people would always be wanting to upgrade their computer in some way, so our dear engineering friends provided ways to do it. One of these ways is the PCI slot. These are slots on the Motherboard—blessed be her name—into which one can plug upgrades.

I got onto the Internet and began surfing some of my favorite sites (geeks.com, tigerdirect.com, and newegg.com) shopping for such an expansion card. I found one for $13. By the way, I am convinced that there are higher laws and greater forces at work here, because these things always cost about $13.

At this point, the narrative becomes a bit messy. Without recounting all of the tragio-comic detail of the thing, let me summarize my important discoveries. The first of these is that you need drivers for these SATA controller cards. The second is they can be found on cnet.com. Don't just go googling because if you do, you will get the wrong ones and it's a head-ache.

The third important discovery is that, unless your BIOS supports booting from a PCI card , these first two discoveries don't matter.

I suddenly heard the voice of a character from Star Trek in my head. It was one of the women from the planet where the men had been banished to the surface and the women had been sent underground. They had gone to the Enterprise and had stolen Spock's brain. The voice in my head said, "BIOS, BIOS, what is BIOS?"

You probably know that your computer has an operating system. Unless you are one of a couple of select breeds—the Mac-o-philes or the Linux-o-laters—your operating system is Windows of one generation or another. However, underneath that operating system, working at a deeper, more profound, and much grittier lever, is the BIOS. It is to the operating system what the group of corporations that actually run the country is to the government. (In this analogy, Windows would be the democrats and republicans, Mac would be the Fascists, and Linux would be the anarchists, but I digress.)

You see the BIOS run at startup before your operating system loads. It controls what you can boot from. The BIOS on my wife's old computer only has provision for booting from either the IDE plug on the Motherboard or the IDE plug that controls the CD-ROM drive. That's it. There is no provision for booting from a PCI card, and I don't know if any BIOS supports such.

In the midst of doing all this, I am, of course, trying to install Windows Home Server. The cognoscenti among you, if there be such, are doubtlessly asking yourselves why I was going to such lengths. Windows Home Server will install on an 80 gigabyte hard drive. It's not ideal, but it will work, and you can always add more memory later.

The answer is this: The [expletive deleted] wouldn't install. I spent half-a-[expletive deleted]-dozen weekends trying to get it installed. Weekend after weekend, I would start at 8 o'clock on Saturday morning with the install. Weekend-after-weekend, the message "you will be done in 51 minutes" would optimistically appear and stay there until 2 o'clock in the afternoon on the following day. At that point, it would proceed to the next step, run through it comparatively quickly, and then give me an error message that the installation had failed an invite me to view the log.

While I am not an expert at reading such logs, my naïve interpretation led me to weave the following account of the installation process's life. Everything had been okay up to a point. Then it had begun a fruitless search for something called qs.ini. It had become obsessed with the subject. It has looked in all manner of unlikely places and, finding it nowhere, had despaired and chosen to end its own life.

Quite sad, really.

I took this information to the Internet and began reading discussion boards on problems with installing Windows Home Server. I found it broached by others in a number of other places. Solutions were offered. I cannot reproduce most of them literally, but I can give a metaphorical account that is non-technical and gives a flavor of what was required.

Take your right hand and nail it to the dining room table with one nail through the pinky and another through the thumb. Then take a scalpel in your left hand begin the process of peeling your fingers down to the bone. Don't use any anesthesia and be sure to have your wife or a family member standing by with smelling salts to revive you if you ever lose consciousness.

Amidst this sort of advice I found one tiny voice saying, "No, no, you don't need to do all that. You need to replace your CD-ROM drive. That is what is causing the problem. It will only cost $13."

The other voices would inevitably reply, "$13? Are you MAD? Your hand is free and you don't even have to use a scalpel, a sharpish butter knife will do."

Having synthesized all of this, I spent about $50 on various bits of hardware, and planned my D-Day. I took the sane bits of advice offered and began my attack. Along the way I'd learned that there was an adapter for SATA drives that allows you to plug them into the IDE plug and boot from them. It cost about $13 dollars. That, a new CD-ROM drive, and $24 worth of other stuff made up my order.

At 8 o'clock the Saturday morning before finals week I began my attack. I installed my SATA/IDE adapter, tried to boot, and nothing happened. I couldn't even get as far as I had before. I then replaced the CD-ROM drive, turned on the computer, and it booted so quickly the CD-ROM sounded like a jet engine. Windows Home Server was successfully installed by noon.

The project from inception to completion took about four months. It was transformative of me. I can now change a hard disk faster than my wife can put a load of laundry in the washer. (I've actually done this, but she didn't know she was competing so that probably isn't fair.) I can remove Motherboards with alacrity. I am on my way to being a geek's geek.

And I didn't lose a single eyebrow in the process.

Location:W 1st St,Pittsburg,United States

PEX to the rescue

The week got off to a bumbling start for me as I let myself get sucked-in by a plumbing job on Sunday afternoon. I had to declare a draw at 8pm that evening an take a half day of vacation on Monday afternoon to get it done. The only uplifting part of the process was my discovery of pex which is the successor of PVC in the universe of plumbing. It's cool stuff. It makes much of the task as easy as tinker toys. It's like PVC without the glue.

I've been recovering from that for the last two days.

Tomorrow I have the privilege of filling in for the dean at an event honoring one of our faculty in Joplin. I am looking forward to it.

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Location:W 1st St,Pittsburg,United States

Potato cannons: warning with regard to variations on design

Because of considerations concerning noise and neighborly relations, I have downsized the design from a potato cannon to a Q-tip pistol. This entails using the outer cylinder of a ballpoint pen as a barrel and a vitamin D bottle as a combustion chamber.

Being the creative individual that I am, I have been exploring different configurations. Today, I thought I would explore the possibilities of using baby bottle as the combustion chamber. It has more volume than the vitamin bottle so it would have just a bit more power. My first trial was a roaring success as I used a half-inch piece of plastic pipe for the barrel.

Encouraged by this success, I decided to try a model with a pen for a barrel. I sprayed in the fuel, pressed the button, and lost a nipple. Fortunately the nipple was from the bottle and not from me, but it was badly enough mangled to cause me concern.

I believe the problem is in using too small of a barrel for the size of the combustion chamber.

Once again I warn the reader these are not toys.

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Location:W 1st St,Pittsburg,United States

Jaws theme music

Having moved back into Grubbs, denial that the new semester is just around the corner becomes more difficult.



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Location:W 1st St,Pittsburg,United States

Moving day

Today was spent moving my office back to Grubbs Hall from Whitesitt Hall. We'd been in our temporary digs since mid-May. There were new international students being oriented today. They were being toured around the Oval in little groups.

The local traffic also shows signs of returning students as there is a noticeable increase in flow and more drivers who don't seem to know where they are going.

Still, I had no appointments today. As Gandalf remarked, it is the deep breath before the plunge.


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Location:W 1st St,Pittsburg,United States

Potato cannon part 3

After yesterday's incident wherein I inadvertently fired my potato cannon using only the residue of the PVC priming agent as fuel, it occurred to me that a potato cannon could be considered a firearm. There are laws against discharging firearms within the city limits, so that sort of slowed down the testing process, that and the fact that Jean doesn't use Aquanet.

You see Aquanet is the Hoyle-recommended fuel for potato cannons. As you may have noticed, the creation of these devices is very much in the spirit of McGyver. You make use of the materials available. Aquanet is just an aerosol hairspray. As with many aerosols, the propellant is flammable, and that is what makes it useful as a fuel for the potato cannon.

In my desire to test my potato cannon, I was required to do some deep thinking and make some fine distinctions. Putting the potato in the end of it was out of the question. That would make it a firearm. However, if the potato is not in the end, it is not a firearm; it's just a fire starter because it is not propelling anything. With no potato it is a fire starter, with a potato it is a firearm, and with a cap on the end it is a fire bomb.

I tried using Jean's sprayable Pam. It didn't work, and I wondered if, perhaps, sprayable Pam uses nonflammable CO2 as propellant.

It then occurred to me that it might not be necessary to use an aerosol. Given the fact that the primer worked and it wasn't an aerosol, this seemed plausible. I looked for isopropyl alcohol, but we didn't have any. I did have rum left over from Christmas 2 or 3 or 4 years ago. I soaked a piece of cotton wool in it and rubbed it on the inside of the combustion chamber. I couldn't get that to work. Maybe the concentration of alcohol in the rum was too small or maybe I just couldn't convince myself to use enough.

I put it aside for the evening after that. I resolved that I would get Aquanet when I bought donuts on my way to Opolis for church this morning. Then, on my way out the door this morning, I noticed a can of windshield de-icer on a bookshelf in my office. I went outside, sprayed the inside of my combustion chamber briefly, closed the lid, and clicked the button.

It didn't make the boom of the day before, but rather the sound of a Coleman stove lighting. I felt warmth coming from the end and it dawned on me the thing was on fire. I smothered out the flame, loaded up the cannon, the spray, and a potato into my car, and headed to Opolis. There I conferred with Perry who is learned in the lore of the potato cannon. He was able to offer me sound advice.

Later this morning I was able to test the cannon with potato in place. The projectile went 100 feet and it sounded like a 22-rifle going off. This is not a toy. This is not for inside the city limits.

This is me

 

The Potato Cannon, Part 2

The last 24 hours have been quite instructive.

Ordinarily in my adventures, I proceed without doing research. I push the project in the manner I naively think it should go, and only when I get to a point from which I cannot proceed do I seek help. (I've been told I need to seek help anyway, but that is neither here nor there.) This time, as there are explosions involved, I decided to read up on the matter first. Before I proceed any further, let me tell you that the phrase "potato cannon plans" will open up a whole new world to you whether it is typed into the Google search engine or the YouTube search engine. For those of you who are carrying the Y-chromosome let me recommend this link.

I found numerous sources and used the one at this location. It gives a parts list and instructions. In that which follows, I will try to gloss a few things in order to give the reader a firmer understanding of the process.

I did my shopping to fill the parts list at Home Depot on Thursday on my way home from work. On Friday, I discovered I didn't have the size of drill bits I needed. (They're around here SOMEWHERE!) I went to Ace and discovered their selection of PVC accoutrement is better. In any case, I had all of the materials assembled by 3PM Friday afternoon. The one part that had bothered me in the entire process was the igniter. I worried about what it was, how to get it, and how to install it.

I will share the first two parts now and save talking about installation until the appropriate time. I am using a replacement igniter for a gas grill. These only cost about $4. They are by the gas grills in Home Depot. The young man in the store didn't know what I was talking about and sent me over to welding supplies. Catch him gone and look around until you find it yourself like I did. (You don't have to wait long.)

The theory behind the potato cannon is simple. A spark ignites fuel. The heat from the burning fuel causes air to expand. As the combustion takes place in a chamber that is closed in all directions but one, the expanding air is forced out of the chamber in one direction. In the potato cannon, the chamber is made of PVC. It is closed on one end by a clean-out cap. The open end of the chamber goes into a bushing that reduces the pipe diameter. In the case of the instructions I've shown you, it reduces from four inches to one-and-a-half inches. It is then directed into the barrel where the expanding pressure will force out the projective, the eponymous potato.

You can see how the spark is key. If there is no spark, then there is no combustion, no heat, no expanding air. It looked to me as if the igniter should be installed first so that care could be taken that it worked correctly as the addition of subsequent parts would make it harder to get to the igniter. Therefore I ignored the directions and installed it first, making sure that it sparked. It was as I was putting the rest of it together that it occurred to me that this was a safety measure. You see, in order to put the PVC pipe together, you use something called primer which is largely alcohol. This gives off fumes. I noticed this as the work was progressing and the question occurred to me about what might happen if my igniter accidently sparked.

I then told each of my daughters whenever they entered the dining room where I was working on this (Yes, it should have been done outside. It was 105 degrees Fahrenheit.) not to push the button, and they immediately began to tease me by pretending they were going to press the button. Once it was done, I immediately took it outside. This morning I took my walk. When I got back home, Jean was outside watering. I helped her for a few minutes and then I showed her my new toy.

"This is the igniter," I said as I clicked the button. The sound of a click was followed by the sound of a boom.

The spark had ignited the residual fumes from the primer in the combustion chamber.

I've gained in respect for this device. I respected it before but more so now. I will not put a finer point on it lest I should open up pathways that would get young people hurt, but let me say it would be very easy for someone to hurt or kill himself with one of these things if he decided to push boundaries.

The potato cannon, part 1

I've always been a quiet contemplative sort, even as a child. I was never rowdy or noisy. When Mrs. Vestal had us play the quiet game in class, I wanted to win it even if Arnita Madron did beat me out most of the time. I've always played it safe. I've only received two speeding tickets in the thirty-two years I've been driving.

I've never engaged in those high adrenaline activities that so many men are drawn to. I don't even like roller-coasters.

But then I was stricken by a mania, an obsession. I was briefly flipping through channels the other day when I passed the Discovery Channel where some respectable-looking middle aged men were running around with devices that appeared to be made of PVC pipe. Along the side was a decal that read "DIKTATER." (I will leave it to smaller minds to give a Freudian reading to that decal.)

One man used the end of the PVC pipe to cut a hunk out of a piece of potato. He then used a piece of dowel rod to tamp it deeper into the barrel, like a Minute Man might do with a musket. He then turned his attention to the other end of his device which was somewhat larger in diameter. Into that end, he briefly sprayed an aerosol can. He closed off end with a cap, hoisted the device upon his shoulder, and pressed a button.

At the pressing of the button a piece of potato was hurled from the other end.

A man the briefly explained that all that was required to do this was PVC pipe, hairspray, and an ignition switch from a barbecue grill.

It was upon learning of the simplicity of the thing that I was fully hooked. I decided that I had to make one.

Ode to a can of Slim Fast

This is an Ode to a can of Slim Fast.