From time to time, I get that certain feeling -- you know what I mean, we're human after all.

At times like these, I'm restless. I can't focus on my reading. So I get up. I walk to where I know there's fun to be had, where I know things will warm up a little bit.

Yesterday's afternoon jaunt was way hotter than I expected.

After stripping it bare, Brett and I installed RAM, hard drives, a processor, and a heatsink to my new server. We pulled out a drive to make room. But when we powered her up,

Whirrrrrrr....Beeep! ....Whirrrrr....(silence)

After a few hours of trying things and thinking, I went over to ask Dr. Leap for advice.

He had some suggestions, and Brett tried them while I helped Dr. Leap compile a custom Linux kernel for one of his dual proc GNU machines. I yo-yoed back and forth between Leap's office and the lab.

Then, while we were trying to figure out how USB hotplug was crashing when we never enabled USB support, Brett popped his head in.

"It's the heatsink."

I breathed a sigh of relief. When I got back to the lab, the box was running. We installed an even bigger heatsink, just in case, and the machine purred happily.

The random urge to wander by the computer science people in Nicarry Hall often bears strange fruit. Last semester, I was in the lab with Brett Lojacono, and I noticed a DEC PDP-8 buried under a stack of keyboards.

"Does it work?" I asked.

We then checked with Dr. Leap.

"I powered it up almost a decade ago, and it worked fine then. One of the lights is out. But maybe we can get it to work," he said.

But then finals engulfed us all, and we forgot.

Two days ago, I asked Dr. Leap about the machine again. So yesterday, in Operating Systems class, he dragged it out and made the lights blink.

I'm not in the class, but Leap is going to let me write programs for it.