My iBook took a tumble off of a stack of
Total Control 1000s yesterday and cracked the screen frame.
My previous iBook fell off my dorm bed and cracked in the same place. I was able to replace the frame and it eventually died of the G3 logic board bug. I think the screen frames are the same, so I'm going to try replacing the frame with one from my G3.
While it may be asking too much for a consumer notebook to survive falling three feet onto the steel plate at the base of a telco rack, all my non-iBook laptops have survived much worse.
I suspect the magnesium frame used in the iBook is too brittle and can't handle the sheer stress next to the hinge.
Prior to the iBooks, I had a Sony VAIO with a 17 inch screen. It survived falling five feet off a ironing board. My brother is using it now, six years later. Its hard drive died and was replaced a few months ago.
The Toshiba 486 laptop that I used in my early teens survived even worse handling.
If I can repair it, my iBook will stay safely at home. I'll try to find a used Panasonic CF-28 for field work. I doubt I can break one of those. I don't need a gaming powerhouse, just something that is compatible with Ubuntu and will run Firefox with decent performance.
Labels: laptop, work
This Christmas Eve morn
Here I sit writing. What do I hear? The dryer, dishwasher, and bathroom fan each buzz in a slightly different manner. My roommates' alarm clock is buzzing. Nightwish is playing in iTunes.
It is the holiday. I have a to-do list. I'm on-call, but my parents are close enough that I could probably go visit them. Unfortunately my younger siblings have a cold. My brother and several friends are in Denver. I don't think I can stretch my on-call response time that far.
So, here I am. It is Christmas Eve and I have a to-do list. I have the kitchen and bathroom partially cleaned. I've turned one broken low-quality futon into a low table. I'm rearranging my bedroom and the living room. I'm a few sections into
The Nicomachean Ethics. Later I'm reading
The Histories. Hooray for time to read.
It is interesting to see which kinds of untidiness people are willing to tolerate.
I am usually surrounded by piles of books, papers, and parts. My roommate keeps his desk clear and books on the shelf.
I notice dust bunnies on the kitchen floor. He goes on vacation and leaves this sink full of dishes.
I wonder which is the more sanitary method of storing eating
utensils, in a drawer or on a
counter top rack? I should find a microscope and count germs.
The system disk in my
e420r died the other day. From now on, said system volume is going on mirrored drives. I wanted to fix it early last week, but work was really busy. I have it plugged into a console server, so I can work on it from home, I just need to setup JumpStart on my
X1.
I was running syslog-ng and
Splunk in a zone on the 420r. In hindsight, I should have used the X1 for infrastructury things and the 420r for projects and hosting.
I installed the X1 first, so I've been using it to host my home page, wiki, and simple projects. I think I'll repurpose it as a
JumpStart/
Nagios/syslog-ng box. I'd like to run Cacti on it as well, but then I need to add MySQL to the mix.
Labels: life, sysadmin, work