I just don't seem to have luck with computers anymore though, out of the ones I still have left there's the following problems:

• hel is randomly freezing. (It's either heat or hard drive related, not sure which yet.)
• skoll hasn't worked right in months. (Hopefully that will be fixed by the end of the week though.)
• hoder is going to end up with new(er) parts since bragi crapped out on me when I went to turn it into a temporary replacement for heimdall. (Bad motherboard? Bad CPU? Bad RAM? Haven't had a chance to check yet.)
• fenrir's getting stripped for parts due to just plain crappiness (Who builds a 486 board that can only take 6MB of RAM anyways? Besides Packard Bell obviously)
• loki's PSU on the other hand is getting flakier and flakier and it still needs a new CD burner. The stuff I need to backup is piling up and plugging in the old one causes Windows to blue screen. (At least it doesn't make grinding noises anymore though.)

(Hey, it's not my fault people have a habit of giving me old hardware and I have no qualms with playing around with it for a while.)

On a brighter note, hermod doesn't seem to be having any problems with the new CPU and the unnamed IIsi seems to be working fine minus the fact that I'm still waiting for a NIC so I can install some sort of *nix on it. (I'm thinking maybe NetBSD just for the hell of it.)

I'm still stuck as to what to call the IIsi though, so feel free to chime in with any suggestions. (If anyone actually reads this that is. Well, besides Jillian… Hey you!) Keep in mind the following though:

1. They should be characters from Norse mythology and there should be some sort of defense as to why to choose it. (Alternatively, "It just sounds cool" is a valid reason.)
2. I don't like to re-use names and, in addition to the ones already mentioned above, I've also used the following at some point or another: baldur, hati, hunin, and munin. (The last two being a pair of Wyse Winterm 2700Ts that I either need to find a use for or get rid of.)
3. I should be able to spell it easily. Refering to machines by their IP addresses isn't fun but not being able to spell the name is just going to make it even less fun. (Translation: Brnnehilde is right out, so don't even think of suggesting it.)

Wonder what the landlord would say about the power bill if I was to switch all of these on at once.

On a non-computer related note, I finally got around to listening to Joy Divison and Einstürzende Neubauten. I'm enjoying the former and I'm finding the latter to be rather . . . interesting.

Finally got around to replacing the old 300MHz Covington Celeron in hermod (the machine this is currently running on) with a recently acquired 400MHz Mendocino Celeron (the fastest processor the motherboard can take as all PIIs above 333MHz used a 100MHz bus instead of 66MHz)

Boy would I have liked to have had this CPU back when I first bought this machine. Served me an entire Bachelor's without ever seeing a major upgrade; in fact it still has the original memory & hard drive in it.
Booted it up with the new CPU and I was amazed at the apparent increase in performance  caused by 100MHz and 128kB of L2 cache. (Yes, yes, I know, placebo effect.)

Hopefully it won't have caught on fire by tomorrow morning and then all will be good, which means there's only one thing left to do: anyone know someone who'd be interested in buying a slightly used Celeron CPU with heatsink?

(10 o'clock and all's well. I think I'll call this successful.)