Leiserson's gesture of approval

Though, yes indeed, it is still the 6th of August, it seemed only fitting to provide some sort of summary for the events that have occurred in the past 22 or so hours.

A good part of this afternoon's activities consisted of driving around in search of a bookstore with Peter David's "Tong Lashing" in stock. Alas, for it seems that what was around a mere week ago at a 30% discount for new novels seems to have made a mass exodus from the shelves upon which they were first placed. Well, nuts to that. Dad and I got a good deal frustrated with the lack of gifts we seemed to be coming up with for my brother's birthday, though I must say that the card mentioned last log did come out quite nicely after some amount of work. In the end, I suppose, everything did come out well, including presents, japanese dinner, and cake, which was quite a relief indeed. A happy birthday to be sure.

On a somewhat less jovial note - Dad and I began some extensive surgery on my poor 486 dos box this afternoon. It seems that after some time of lying dormant, quite a bit of dust had settled in the various nooks and crannies (translating to: the whole bloody case was filled with dust that took 2 and a half Dustbusters to sort-of clean). This would be our hypothesis as to why my brother reported just last week that "something went pop, and then I smelled something burning.Now the screen's blank" (one friend has commented, "Violent."). All things considered, it was a miracle the whole computer didn't go up in flames upon failure. After a small adventure with a tiny ratchet-set which we used to remove the video card (Orchid Technologies), sound card (SBPro), and the hard drive controlling hardware, we found a large blue capacitor leaking what appeared to be juices on the motherboard. As far as component ffailures go, it seemed to be fairly consistent with the blanking of the monitor, and thusly we concluded that the entire motherboard had to be replaced. Whilst gutting the machine in preparation for motherboard replacement, we came across a piece of broken brown capacitor-casing rolling around across the motherboard - unable to find the broken component from which it originated, we also came to the conclusion that some imbecile a long long time ago in a galaxy far away must have randomly tossed in a bit into the case and left it there for laughs. Now that we've cleaned up most of the computer's innards, I think we'll be ready to ream in the spare motherboard he has lying around - it's been quite the father-daughter crufting experience.

Ah well, it's nearly time for bed, and this entry has contained quite a few gorey details. As a parting thought, I wonder if anyone at Random Hall is keeping the toilets by my room minty fresh while I'm away. I wonder still, if they are using my special 6.042J toilet tablets - with each flush, you obtain Leiserson's gesture of approval. Further bulletins as events warrant.