the eXternal mind

One of my friends in Avery is Eric Tai, and he’s pretty into computer hardware. Caltech dumps a lot of electronics sometimes, and Eric usually tries to salvage things from the dumpsters. Surprisingly, he’s pretty successful. For instance, there were these series of 21-in. Sony Trintion flat screen (not LCD though) monitors that were thrown out because the display on the screens were too light and distorted. Eric thought this was weird and did some research online. He found this hack to flash the EEPROM of the monitors and correct the display. So he suddenly had 3 really good 21-in. monitors…

Anyway, he convinced me to go on a salvaging trip today. We couldn’t find any spare shopping carts so I suddenly thought of the electric cart in the basement of Avery house. We were pretty happy about the thought of driving around computer equipment instead of carrying it across campus (big monitors weigh a lot!). However, when we were just about to leave, the cart disappointingly didn’t budge: we needed a key! I was about to give up, but Eric started using his mail key which I thought: That couldn’t possibly work! But it did! Eric got the lock to turn, but it didn’t hold. I got out my key, and by “bumping” the key around while turning, I managed to open the lock! Eric and I were estatic: who would have thought our measly mail keys would start the electric cart?

To make a long story short: We picked up another monitor and two motherboards with dual Pentium III (733Mhz) processors. Then we spent most of the Saturday night in the Avery computer lab trying to piece together two Frankensteinish computers with components from older computers and from components that Eric had previous procured. We were working on separate PIII systems so it was kind of like a competition. I had my system up and running, and I was just about to install Windows in the hard drive when the power supply died on me. So Eric was able to win :).