My Birthday Present

Proving that I am indeed a techie... and that our definition of "normal"... differs... from that of other people.

Rich and I were at Fry's about a week before my birthday. Fry's is a SF Bay Area institution, a techie hardware store. They sell computers, televisions, hard disks, DVDs, MP3 players, game players, memory chips, potato chips, and a whole lot more,

While Rich was buying RAM, I was looking at the DVDs. Then I came to find Rich and passed something wonderful in a nearby aisle. I found Rich and took him back to look at the Wonderful Thing.

It was a power supply. ;-) But not just any power supply, oh no! This was far better and more fanciful than the other, ordinary, aluminum-cased boxes on the shelf.

For starters, the upper half of the case was transparent! That's so you can see all the neat stuff inside. And, the neat stuff inside is all brightly colored too. But it got better!

The cables were all sheathed in bright green "UV-protective" material. The unit looked like a strange bright-green octopoidal creature from outer space. All of the connector plugs were yellow. The power switch and plastic surrounding where the power cable is plugged in were fluorescent green. The packaging advertised two blue LEDs in the fan housing. Whoooooooo.

What a cool toy. Unfortunately, we didn't need a power supply for anything. But. But. And it wasn't expensive. But. Still.

I looked at Rich. Rich looked at the power supply. I looked at the power supply. Rich turned to me.

"Happy Birthday Vicki!" said he.

"Oooooooohhh ... Thank you sweetie" said me.

So we bought the power supply (and Rich found some neon-colored molex connectors for it). Then we brought it home where it waited patiently for us to find just the right sort of lamp or something to drive off it (because to run it, it had to drive something).

Last night, we found just the perfect thing.

Rich has been planning to install FreeBSD 5.3 and upgrade our server. He always does this upgrades by installing a second machine, then moving everything over from the previous machine. This saves some pain. Usually.

So after he finally got the thing together, Rich came into my office and said the fateful words "There's a problem..." (Uhuh). It seemed that the power supply that came with the computer housing wasn't going to be adequate for what was required. But.

"There's a perfectly good 500W power supply sitting on the shelf on the next room and..." said he.

"Sure. Sounds perfect. Use it." said me.

Rich suggested that we could make an expedition to Fry's to get me replacement power supply but I said I thought this was just fine, actually, even better than just driving some light bulbs. My power supply would be In Use. Rich doesn't put the case back on these machines, so I'll be able to see the blue LEDs in action whenever I go into the server room.

Not only that, but my fancy colorful power supply goes well with the red motherboard, the tangerine-colored anodized-aluminum heat sink, the pastel-colored connectors on the back, and the fancy AMD hologram on the fan over the CPU housing (woooo). It's all rather much of a piece.

My Birthday Present ( in category Computerware , Treasures ) - posted at Sat, 12 Feb, 12:06 Pacific | «e»