Sung to the tune of The Beasty Boys. Or something like that.

So last night, I was up until... should I even say? I should. I was up and about until 4am, assembling hardware. Got all the components put together and connected. And, oh, is it slick!

But the last hour before giving up and going to bed was spent attempting to diagnose why powering up caused a continuous recurring beeping noise from the speaker, and no output was shown on the monitor. According to the manual, this means that no memory has been detected. So, natuarally, I repeatedly took out my DIMM, reinserted it, tried to push it in harder, tried putting it in each of the other slots, and then repeat. No success.

So, I took my cards out, tried disconnecting everything until it was down to just a bare bones setup. Still the same thing. Then I tried taking out the chip and putting it back on. No luck. Then back to playing with the memory. Again, same result.

Finally, I went to bed with some very sore thumbs and fore fingers (I can still feel the ache when I press them together).

Awoke at 0620, before Dagobah's wake_up_dammit cron job had even had a chance to start. Played with it some more, before finally abandoning the project to get ready for work.

I arrived to an extremely quiet office at around 0750 (all the management has been out of town for the first part of this week, so the theory goes that with them went all the noise and distraction). Hope certain people don't read that and get the wrong idea. ;)

So anyway, once at work, I did a little net research about my problem, and discovered that there were indeed other people who had purchased my motherboard model and had the same experience. I actually didn't find out a whole lot, but what I did find proved to be enough.

After a day of hard, brutal, exhausting labor (You can decide for yourself whether that was intended as sarcastic or not), I decided that once I did get this thing working (and make no mistake: I was going to make it work. Come hell or high water, not another day would pass without this problem being taken care of.) Ahem.. I decided I wanted to have something cool to install when the machine was up and running.

So I made my way through traffic hell over to CompUSA to attempt to pick up a copy of Quake 3. (Actually, I tried another store that had been reputed to carry it first, but they had gone out of business.) I searched back and forth, high and low, and was unable to find anything but a version of the game which runs on an OS which I steadfastly refuse to install any of my personal hardware.

I finally decided to ask a clerk, just in case I had been blind. (Entirely possible, given the amount I had slept the previous night.)

"Do you guys have the Linux version of Quake 3 here?"

"Ummm... Let me check. I know they made one, but I'm not sure if we carry it." That's a plus. The person is actually informed enough to know that such a thing does, in fact, exist. A few notches above the usual CompUSA drone, in my experience.

Well, a few keystrokes later, and they told me that the store does not have it "yet". (Given that it's been out since before the beginning of the year, I have to believe that the use of the word "yet" was either a forlorn hope, or an attempt to reassure me that the store has not become as pathetic as it actually seems to be.)

A whole big store, supposabely dedicated entirely to retailing computer stuff, and not a single copy of Linux Quake 3 to be found within those walls? To quote Dr. Arroway totally out of context, "That's an awful waste of space."

I did buy another surge protector on the way out, as my current daisy chain setup of surge protector plus cheapo power strip is more than maxed out already. (Since it wasn't working anyway, I had temporarily unplugged the DSL router to make room for the newest member of the family. In hindsight, this proved to be a Very Bad Idea, but I'll get to that shortly.)

Well, to close off the Quake 3 thought, it looks like I'll be buying my games from linuxmall.com, or one of the other online dealers. Not to say I have anything against Linux Mall, but when possible, I prefer to buy stuff like that in meatspace if I can. Guess I'm just old fashioned in that way.

When I got home, I of course started right back up with the tinkering. This time, I had a vaguely better idea of what to look for. One of the messages had said that improperly inserted memory can cause the beeping problem, as the manual had said. But it can also be due to a processor which has been improperly inserted.

I examined the fascinating mechanism more closely, and tried removing and reinserting the processor rig a few times. (For those who haven't seen the Athlon + cooler + fan thingees, they're HUGE. For a CPU chip, I mean.) A closer look revealed that no matter how hard I pushed, the left lock was NOT snapping shut. The right lock (from my perspective) snaps shut, and it looks good from a cursory glance, so you assume that because you heard that click, it's in. Not so.

The trick is to somehow wedge a finger underneath the motherboard, since that portion of it is suspeded with nothing beneath. Not exactly a piece of cake, considering the power supply makes it very difficult to get a hand in between there, and you can't come up from under, because the case panel gets in the way. (lol at anyone who actually tries to imagine what I'm attempting to describe. If it were me, I'd probably just scan right over all this, and be thinking "Get on with it, Bitscape!")

Well, ok. I did manage to squeeze my fingers around the power supply to hold the board in place, this time truly snapping it in hard. Plugged the skeleton components in, powered up, and... TADA! No beeping! An image on the monitor! BIOS! WOO HOO! We are IN BUSINESS.

(And yes, this all could have been averted if I had properly attached the processor BEFORE inserting the motherboard into the case. Well I did attach the processor before inserting it, but I didn't even do it close to properly. And since last night, I didn't feel like unscrewing my motherboard and taking it back out, only to discover something else wrong when it was back in, I did an "inside the case" job. Hah!)

So ecstatic that it was working, I almost didn't know what to do with myself. Went and got some supper from the freezer while pondering my next move...

...which was to call RMI back.

[Rewind]

Today at work, I got an actual real live call from a person at the ISP, to whom I described the problem. They gathered my info, got my report officially put into their (and Covad's) database, and I was told to call the tech support line and give them my problem id (primary key) when I could directly access and monitor the line.

Tonight, I did just that. The first thing I was asked is whether the DSL router had been unplugged at any time during the day. Oops.

Covad had already attempted to check the loop, and gotten nothing. That means either a) a dead line, or b) the router is down. I confessed that I had unplugged it. They're gonna test it again tonight or tomorrow. From this point, there is NO WAY I am letting the power to that thing get cut, even for a single second. :)

If their loop check fails again, it'll be time to send the US Pest'ers to check it out. Oh, boy!

Progress. It's some kind of progress. We hope.

After that, I caught up on my accounting, paid some bills, and... typed this rambling, which may or may not be seen by the rest of the world before the end of this Millennium. (Just for proper perspective, I am talking about the real Millennium, which expires at the end of the coming December.)

Next, I shall attempt to get some usable power routed without interrupting the DSL's circut, and proceed through the BIOS configuration screens. Then, it'll be time to install a temp distro while I figure out what to do next.

Will there be any sleep tonight? There'd better be, at some point. With all this stuff though... ya gotta wonder.

Power to the insanity. It's the only thing that keeps us sane.