For some reason, the limit to me for sleeping in is noon. I don’t like to let myself stay in bed after that. I probably fell asleep last night around 4:30, but when I got up today and saw the clock say 12:04, I needed to get out of bed. Even if it wasn’t to do anything in particular.

I did end up doing something in particular though. It ended in me killing a computer. Not violently like Joe and Jessica tend to do, but in a more subtle and accidental way. All I was trying to do was make a 40GB hard drive recognizable on an older machine. That required flashing the BIOS. Now the PC that I was trying to upgrade was not a reputable make of any kind so locating a BIOS file was fairly difficult. Apparently the one that I ended up using didn’t work. It seemed to flash just fine, but when I restarted the computer, it would come up with an error and tell me to go into Setup. Setup could not be gotten into though. At this point there is nothing to do. All this stuff is before it detects any drives or whatever, so I can’t just stick a floppy back in and do it over. I read a few places about possible solutions. One was to try a hot swap with working BIOS chip. I tried that with one that was from an older computer with a different chipset, and it didn’t work. I have no other ones that I want to take the BIOS chip off of to try it with. If I could find an ISA controller card, supposedly with one of those the floppy is accessed before anything else so I could flash the BIOS again, but those are very old and hard to come by. It’s the reason I’m a packrat, but people convince me to throw things away, curse you!

We have other computers around, so it’s not the end of the world. I’d never screwed something up like that before, so it was kind of fun.[/nerdiness]