DSL Talk

Well, I am relieved to find that at least two other people have or have had DSL PCs in their garage. It's good to not be alone.

But this week has been a scavenger hunt for old Dell laptop parts. You see, my wife's Latitude 500Mhz CPx was falling apart and overburdened by too much Windows and too little ram. So I raided the store of old Latitudes stored (for some unknown reason) in the server room at work. Now I'm not the "IT Guy" and it requires special cooperation and skills to "borrow" "dead" laptops "to get a few parts from". God bless my IT guys. I help them out (ie: let them borrow my tools and am generally a low-maintenance user) and they let me part-out old laptops. Symbiosis, pure and simple... Although they have asset tags, old, dead laptops probably don't exist "officially" any more, most of them having last been booted over two years ago. Of course, all of them were under 1Ghz. Two yielded good keyboards, one yielded a PCMCIA slot assembly, one yielded a good touchpad/wrist rest/speakers. Before long I had three whole, working machines and one really dead one and a slow one. One of the repaired ones is a 400Mhz CPi, much like the 333Mhz CPi that was so useful in the garage, but with a LCD panel that stands up straight.

Now it's after St. Patrick's Day and I am remodelling the garage. So I have my little DSL-laptop and old Hafler DH-200 and a pair of antique Smaller Advents (purchased in 1978?) in the garage with me to keep me musical company.

Oh yes, I am typing this while standing in the garage listening to the Chieftians.

Do I have he only DSL-equipped garage in North Texas? Maybe.

--jm

Long Story...
Every year my wife and I host a St. Patrick's day party. I am in charge of the music.

First came records, and I was stuck next to the turntable (nobody else was allowed to touch my Thorens or later, my Rega).

Then came cassettes, and I would let someone else change them. But they all had to be recorded first.

Then came CDs, and someone else could change them too. A 5-disk Sony changer made it easier to mix the music without needing to record cassettes for hours and hours.

But when we moved to Texas and went all networked and wireless, I started my quest for the ultimate, streaming, synchronized system. This search is still on, but that's another story.