And Now Back To Our Regularly Scheduled... Drivel.

Yep, it works.  On both the new AND old computers.  

What's that?  Oh, I suppose there's another opportunity for me to go over the IT infrastructure here.  It's complicated.  Not at all.

Seriously.  

I have a computer which appears was made in perhaps 2007, is still running, and is, until recently, my primary computer.  It's limped along for a while now, having come out of the ... well, it works, but it was an addition to the family after 2009.  In pre-Pandemic days, there was a shop in Bloomington, Minnesota, known as "The Box Shop".  It was one of those wonderful little shops that used to be probably a donut or candy shop of some sort, because many of the original furnishings were there.  But most of the store was filled with bits of electronics.  Monitors, computers, both desktop and laptop, plus the occasional server here and there, and keyboards, mice, video cards, boxes of memory, cables, drives...  A few corporation-sized lots of items.

I picked this small-form desktop up for a whopping $40.  It's loaded with 4 gigs of RAM, a huge improvement over the previous machine which had 1 Gig.  Modern programs have not been written by people who ever needed to conserve RAM down to individual characters.  I do recall my early VIC-20 days where I would putter about writing basic programs and seeing what this thing could do.  Yes, I was a self-taught programmer, reading magazines for tips, then figuring out what happened if I changed it.  I still recall one of my first programs was an attempt at, well, a sort of video game flying through space.  Random dots would appear on the screen and grow, you used the arrows on the keyboard (I did not know how to read inputs from things like joysticks - but to be fair, we did not have external devices that could be plugged into the VIC-20 other than a disk drive).  It was childish, but fun.

Anyway, this computer has seven external drives hanging off of it, ranging from 30 gig to 4 TB.  They're all some form of storage or backup.  The smallest is the main drive from my previous system, seemed to be the easiest way to get the files off the drive when the machine failed by keeping the drive.  It was readable, so I bought an external case and installed it in that device.  Still works like a champ.  One of the external drives stores music, another only pictures, and ... well, there are several backup targets.  Because in the past I've lost data and programs I really did not want to lose.  But it is what it is, the saying goes.

So anyway, this is the grandfather on the network.  It used to be attached to my Samsung Color Laser Printer, but that, while it still sits here staring at me, serves primarily as the holder where I set my cell phone when plugged in and charging, because it's convenient.  Above me is the Canon inkjet printer I bought for a whopping $40 because I needed output for kid homework, resumes, and the like.  I did forget rule #1 with inkjets - use weekly or dispose.  We're now in the dispose stage of that device's life, but I'm one of those "well, maybe I might find something useful to do with ..."  There are motors and other things it might be fun to play with.  

Way up top is an 8-port network switch which brings me to the internet, at the end of about 50 feet of Cat-5 cable that takes it up to my wife's office, the room that was formerly my son's, where the Cable Modem was installed because that's where a jack was.  Way up there is my wife's office, where she also keeps her laptop, a hand-me-down from my son, his first college laptop with a bad battery.  It's a beautiful 17" screen Dell Laptop, so that's very nice.  Even has the numeric keypad, it's that big.  We did just upgrade it about two weeks ago from 8 to 16 Gigs RAM, but it's still running slowly, so I'm most likely going to have to do a deep-dive cleanup and remove some of the things that are slowing it down.

As the network cable passes through the living room, there's another 8-port network switch, this one connects to the TV, another Wifi node (there's one in my wife's office, as well), and it's where my Dell Laptop hangs out.  It's a new, 16" screen model with 16Gb memory, which I'll eventually expand to 32 Gigs, the max.  

Why both a desktop and laptop?  If I were silly-person rich, which I'll never be, I'd have a home network that included multi-Petabytes of storage, and yes, I do finally understand Windows ME - as in Media Edition.  I would love to be able to drop the collection of DVDs we've acquired over the years so that I might browse through the Space 1999 series, all of Star Trek Deep Space 9, Babylon 5, and other sets - along with also having time to watch a lot of other content out there on the various On-Demand opportunities we have.  But that would require a few more lifetimes I do not expect I have before me...  

Which means that, now that I have not heard the dogs moving around for a while, I had best check on them, get them fed, and outside.  I had hoped to sleep late today - I guess "late" was 7:19 am.  Really was hoping for something in double-digits, given I did not "conk out" until 11:30 last night, which is very late for me, but, well, Friday.  Now that I'm back down from 10-11 hour days to 8 hour days, well, it is what it is.  Off to clean up after the dogs and see what sort of dent I can make in the HoneyDo list.  Plumbing at the top of that (I need to unclog the laundry room sink, over there in the corner, so we can do more laundry - oh, and for real fun, yeah, build yet another lint trap to see what I can do about keeping the line to the street as unplugged as possible.  More fun - this time, looks like I'll be using composite "deck boards" to make a non-porous container with fine mesh filtering out the biggest bits of lint.  Who knew there was that much of it...  Talk about renewable resources...).

TTFN.