Howard Young

The only bad thing about I.M. Mortal III, is that Dell provided a mechanical mouse with a ball.  I’ve been using the same optical mouse for about 5 years now with out any problems.

With the old style ball mouse, I would have to take out the ball and clean it every 3 months and then toss it out only to buy a new one after a year.

I splurged and bought a Microsoft Natural Wireless Mouse 6000.  The “Natural” is an ergonomic mouse designed to keep the pressure off your wrist.  It’s taking a little time to get use to the position but if it reduces the pressure on my wrist, it’s worth the price.

I managed to fry my motherboard with a little help from Southern Cal Edison. They’ve been having power outages in Thousand Oaks with the last one causing all my servers to shutdown after the UPS ran out of juice.

ClknGo Server 1 (cngs1) is a Win2k server that automatically shuts down via a signal from the UPS when the power is on battery backup.

Pacific Landmark Server 1 (plms1) is a Linux (Red Hat 9), but doesn’t have driver installed to automatically shutdown … so that means, if I’m at home, I shut it down when the lights go out.

My workstation, I. M. Mortal Jr., also on a UPS, shutdown but when the power came up, the power supply was in a weird mode and smoked the motherboard when I turned the UPS back on. The data on the disk drive was OK and I was able to boot the drive off my old HP (I. M. Mortal) which I recently retired after 7 years of faithful use.

I don’t have the time to put together a new system right now so, I. M. Mortal III is now a Dell Optiplex. Dell did a great job of getting it out to me in 3 business days. Luckily, I’ve been converting everything to run on Microsoft Virtual PC since it’s so convenient — and in the case of a fried system — it’s so easy to get back up and running again.

If I was playing football, I’m sure that this was some obscure pattern that I would never remember from the play book. Wouldn’t it be easier just to say “go down and out?”

But in my case, the number sequence is from Apollyon, by Tim Lahaye and Jerry B. Jenkins. The publisher really screwed up the printing on this one.

This, of course, implies that 32 pages are missing. What is strange about it is that page 182 segues perfect into page 215. So I’m not sure that anything was missing.

I’ll have to go back to Borders to see if other prints have the same problem. I’m curious to see what was in the missing chapter.

The Left Behind series is an excellent read especially if you like religious fiction.