Sans screwdriver

25 Sep 2004

In the anarchy and chaos which has reigned since this “let’s sell the house” thing began, this geek has been feeling alone and screwdriver-less. Well, that’s not quite true. I did have the screwdriver, for a time, living discreetly behind my D-Link ADSL modem thing. At some point in time, one of the co-residents appears to have borrowed and not returned this spectacularly useful device to its’ temporary home.

This event saddens me greatly, as I maintain that this screwdriver was, without a doubt, the best in the world. Sadly, I can’t find a photo at this time — if/when we are reunited, I’ll be sure to post happy-snaps for all the world to see.

In the meantime, I must be content with using the world’s bluntest not-Swiss-Army knife, and the garden clips you see on the right of your screen (or, if you’re using a browser which sucks, the image located slightly above… at least, the alt description is “The Wilkinson Sword, garden clippers extraordinaire!”). Spectacular though these utilities may be, I miss my screwdriver.

Yes, I really did use those garden clips on a computer, and no, I feel no remorse. Someone whinged at me about blunting them, but I promptly started whinging back about how some horrible monster had swallowed my screwdriver, magnetic tips and all, so they soon shut up. The network card in question is no worse off, I’m glad to inform you all. And neither is the Voodoo 5, to the best of my knowledge… it’s currently sitting, quite unused, on my desk doing absolutely nothing.

Why? Well, it was sitting in my makeshift “router”, wasn’t it… and that’s just throughly stupid! In fact, that router was equipped with an overclocked Pentium 3 running at 560MHz (112MHz FSB), 256MB of RAM, a 64MB Voodoo 5 5500, and a Creative PCI soundcard, the model of which I haven’t bothered to ascertain… although, from vague memory, I think it’s a Vibra 128. Oh, yeah, and an intel Pro NIC and another generic Realtek 8139 card. Does that seem utterly pointless to anyone else?

I know, other people are (or were, once upon a time) running equally stupid Smoothwall system configurations, but that doesn’t make it any better — I have this vague dream in which I manage to build a router that is actually QUIET for once! Shocking, I know. Well, this Pentium 3, when I grabbed it from the shelf, was already so much quieter than the old router was — despite having a graphics card which needs molex power, and has two fans running at full bore… not to mention the extra case fan or two.

That doesn’t matter, though. The old router sounded much like a jet engine when starting up… I’ve been meaning to ask an environmental audio guy if I can borrow a meter for the weekend some time, just for the fun of having some real numbers. At any rate, even the new system was more noisy than it should be; let’s not start on power consumption.

I opened it up, removed the sound card, which was UTTERLY unnecessary, using the painfully BLUNT knife as a screwdriver. Next up? That graphics card has to go! Unplug molex (why is that always so hard?!), try to unscrew with knife. This isn’t working. A few minutes before, I’d tried to remove the graphics card from the old router, to swap out (yeah, I had plenty of others around, but I knew this one worked, and couldn’t be bothered sorting through those which didn’t… that’s another activity for a rainy day) with that in the new Pentium 3 system. Bzzzzzzt.

Hurray for burred screws! Of course, they were only so burred that it would cause a problem for anything that didn’t fit the hole nicely — my usual screwdriver would have! Logical solution to the problem? Pliers. Had any of them survived the garage-stuffing holocaust? Unlikely!

I furtively glanced around the kitchen for an implement suited to the purpose. Someone had been outside, gardening, and brought the snips inside when they finished. VICTORY IS MINE!!! I don’t care that they’re garden snips, if they work, score 1 to Josh! Needless to say, they did.

The cards were swapped, and all lived happily ever after. Now, if only I could figure out how to make Smoothwall APM aware…