hot & bothered
Today was moderately crappy on many fronts. It was hot today. 87F hot. Add to that the fact that the problem with the DSL line was actually the DSL modem, which cost \$122 to replace. On top of that, there's still no appealing prospects to replace me at work, so I'm stuck for the time being. Add to that, I spent the day fighting with crappy hardware. In one system, I added an ordinary Intel Pro100 PCI NIC. In some PCI slots, it never even appeared on the PCI bus (FC6). In others, it just never worked (100% packet loss). After going through 5 slots, I finally found one that worked. Then a 2nd system was just crap. It was randomly hang during POST, and the only way to get it to stop hanging was to pull the CMOS battery. Now this system was supposed to be in my under-construction automation farm, so having it reliably reboot is critical. Finally I got that system replaced with one that seems to work better.
Hopefully tomorrow is better.