Chumputer

Well, my 4-5 year old Chumputer finally gave up its magic smoke. Not that it burned, it just won't boot. It won't even start the POST. It has Bit the Big One, passed on, left its loved ones behind (me?). It's pushing up digital daisies. It died.
I'll miss the booger. I miss it already, have missed its presence immensely. Good calculating on the other side, my friend.
I'm presently writing this on a borrowed machine. It doesn't come close to my dead friend. Its only a P3 with 256M of memory, and thrashes the harddrive just using a browser. On the otherhand, it works. And I very much appreciate its use from my very good friend, Courtland.
Court is a hell of a guy, smart, with a heart. His wife, Kirsten, is too.
I met Court 10 years ago as of this past June. I was working in the computer science lab at the local community college, and Dr. Pusins the department head told me she had hired a new guy for the lab. When I met him he was just starting in computers, and I threw stuff at him to make him think. Things like changes to his login script.
I wrote one quick application in VB3, that looked like the error boxes that Novell produced, only this one did them as random errors (even though there wasn't really an error.) It would load and wait a random period, then popup. With a small change, I made it so if the OK button was pressed, it would start another process, so there'd be two running. At that time the machines in the lab only had 16 MB memory, so it didn't take long for all of it to be used up. This particular version caused Court to accuse me of writing a virus. I don't think it fit that description well, personnally.
The point is I really have enjoyed my friendship with Court and his wife, and can think of no better friends I could have.