OCC 2026 - Day 2
----------------

Today did not go as planned.

The plan was, I would gather together all the equipment I
will need for this project:

Dell D610 laptop
Generic 386 PC
VGA monitor
PS2 Keyboard
Serial mouse
Old Webcam
Null modem cable
Floppy disk
Power bars and cords, etc

... and maybe spend a bit of time installing software, etc.

Much of this equipment is library surplus gear we've been
holding onto for one reason or another, squirrelled away in
various nooks and crannies in different parts of the
building.  A lot of it resides in what used to be our old
server room up on the third floor - back when university
departments like ours were allowed to have server rooms -
and that's where I thought we'd stashed the 386 PC.

I can't remember the last time I paid a visit to this
particular room, but it was probably some weeks ago. Anyhow,
what should greet me when I walked through the door but a
big pool of water, all over the floor. Flood!

So instead of spending an hour or so working on my OCC
project, I had to deal with that.  Call campus security,
wait for them to arrive and confirm that yes, it's a flood,
whereupon they called some other guy who figured out where
the water was coming from, a steady drip-drip-drip from an
ancient air conditioning unit up near the ceiling.  Now,
aircon was totally necessary back when we had a bunch of
servers running in there, but that was years ago.  I guess
no one (including me) ever thought to turn it off. (Check
the maintenance log - yep, last service call was 2005).

Fortunately I don't think much was damaged.  We lost a few
books, mostly on the subject of X11 programming, and one or
two boxed copies of MS DOS 6.22, that were on a counter
right under the air conditioner.  But most of the equipment
was on raised shelves, so untouched by liquid.

But I've lost a day, and now I'm running behind on this OCC
project that I knew I wasn't going to finish on time anyway
... not sure how I'm going to cope with the stress :-)


Mon Jul  6 21:07:56 PDT 2026