Wireball Assassin

The Wireball Assassin, a high-performance bleeding-edge computer I built in 2000 that was reviewed in MaximumPC magazine and received a 9/10 & Kick-Ass! Product Award, and only sold one unit, last surfaced in mid-2005. Looks like a Debian user!

From the description ("uber-buggy"), it looks like the capacitors might have begun leaking on the ABIT KT7-RAID. ...the IBM Deskstar 75GXPs are long-dead, though. The replacements were either Maxtor or Seagate 40GB 7200RPM drives.

Things like that are one of the reasons I've started using equipment that's been around at least a year or two in my personal computers - bleeding-edge technology is an expensive pain in the ars. Although, given how much I overclock my personal computers, I tend to have problems from time to time anyway :)

And, given that most of my equipment now is surplus or used, I can't be a chooser; I actually have both a KT7-RAID and a KT7A motherboard, both of which are in use. Performing ok so far; whoever last used them must not have left their computers on very much, because the capacitors aren't leaking yet. Nice overclockers, too.

First Bicycle Ride in a Long While

So, I took a several mile bicycle ride this evening. We took some important bits out of the car*, it appears, so it wouldn't start, and some videos needed to be returned tonight. Friday night.

My bike is a European racing road bicycle, with 700x23c narrow tires and no reflectors. Park Pre brand. The handling is pretty sensitive and twitchy - very unlike the old Huffy road bike with 24" wheels I owned when I was younger. I seem to have misplaced my front headlight mounting bracket, so I lashed it on with high-stick masking tape. Lacking a taillight, I applied some layers of clear tape over a white 5-LED headlamp I have, with red permanent marker applied to each layer of tape, and taped it to the seatpost facing back. When I was finished, I had a quite decent red rear light (conveniently, it even has a flasher mode).



I left at 8PM, and the ride went quite well. Traffic was light, and what traffic there was kindly gave me a wide berth (this is in Pasadena, CA, for reference). It only took me about 30-40 minutes round trip to the video rental and back, which is a great improvement on walking. We walked there and back once, and it took a little over two hours and was extremely grueling - though I certainly wasn't (and still am not) in very good shape (skinny, sure, but sedentary). Back in the old days it wouldn't have bothered me in the least.

I just looked it up on the map, and boy am I out of practice - it's only about 2.5 miles each way. Sheesh, I've got to ride my bicycle more; this is ridiculous. In Seattle in the '90s a 3-mile bike ride was a mere jaunt for me, and walking that far wasn't that big of a deal either.

* - Edit 09-Jan-06: Important bits = the computer under the passenger side. Plugging the larger unit back in got the car starting again, and the smaller unit apparently controls shifting, because I wasn't able to shift out of park until I plugged it in (while the car was turned off, of course). '91 Honda Accord LX 4-door sedan.