A Good Imagination and a Pile of Junk

I’ve got my pc (yep, my only wintel desktop left) and my mini hooked up to a 2-port DVI KVM to which is tethered my lovely 23″ apple cinema ADC display thingamabob.

Last night the display stopped displaying and the little power light started flickering on and off at about one second intervals (which sometimes happened with the crap-ass kvm I’ve got. I’ll get the model number and make to recommend against in a minute) so I did the switch everything off then back on thing, the “is everything plugged in…. REALLY plugged in?” thing. Nothing.

After a few minutes of fiddlation the lcd stopped receiving power… it seems.

So I went to bed disgusted and had my first full-on “wake up screaming” night terror in a l0ng time (which I think was far more closely related to the HP Lovecraft story I read as I drifted off than it was to the lcd not working… but let’s remember who’s talking here…. ya never know.)

This morning (read: 10 minutes ago as my laptop was taking it’s own sweet time in booting) I ripped everything out of the kvm and plugged everything directly into the mini.

Nothing.

:-/

Now I have to go pull the G4 out of the closet (where it’s been humming along, nice and file-servy for ever) and try and connect the display right to that, instead of going through a dvi converter to see if THAT’S the problem.

Is it so damn hard to get things that work? The task of getting ahold of a 2-port DVI KVM was horribly frustrating, then the dvi-adc converter, then a week of tweaking to realize what order my cpus and monitors needed to be switched on to get the whole ensemble to work (it’s very particular) to create the tenuous balance I’ve been sufficing with for the last couple months (gah, is it 6? when did they announce the dual-core intel minis?)

And now something breaks a nail.

It’ll be ok. I’ve already decided to use this as an opportunity to break away from the internet (can’t you tell?) and rent the heavy equipment and hire a demolitions crew to come and clean my apartment once and for all, so I can do some long-promised baking this weekend (and …well… nevermind what else.)

Maybe it’ll plug into the g4 and just work.

But I doubt it.

I’m really not looking forward to dropping any cash on anything. Not that I don’t have it. I’m finally nice and flush again (it’s a long path to savings when you’ve got $220 a week in personal training sessions on top of rent.) I’m just not all that excited about not having money.

If then, when I come back at 12:30, I can’t get the lcd to work; I’m just going to go get it’s original box out of the closet, put it in there, hook up the crt I’ve got to my wintel box, slurp the files off the mini over the network, then just shut it down and move on for a while.

Besides I have a target, reachable (though not quickly) goal of savings which, when reached, allows me to:

Stop working for someone else forever.

All my professional life I’ve been making money in significant excess of my needs, and as such the notion of “going without” has been an entirely unnecessary concept.

So I’m starting to get a little thirsty. But I’ve got no well. I do have one kick ass shovel that will take me through a few years should I not just swap it out for another.

But now, ironically, I’ve got to go buy another 20 training sessions, which comes to about $1700. about 3% of my total savings goal.

The only thing more expensive than those… is not buying them.