I’ve been having computer trouble. My main (but soon-to-be backup) computer has been acting up lately. Since I fixed the broken heatsink, it crashed several times. Is it aging hardware? Is it a virus? An instability due to a recent update? Or perhaps, possibly, the result of the fact that most recently, I plugged the network into the gigabit Ethernet interface, as opposed to the 100Base-T one? (This motherboard has two network connectors.) I know for a fact that the gigabit Ethernet interface used to cause problems, but I thought that was fixed by driver updates ages ago. Perhaps not.
Anyhow, since I swapped the network cable, the system has been stable for days. Today, its video driver crashed, but that’s not new: the complicated driver set of my ATI All-In-Wonder card (combination high-end graphics and TV tuner card; well, whatever passed for high-end in 2005, that is) was never 100% stable, but it is stable enough for reasonably reliable use. Today’s crash, too, was recoverable: I was able to Remote Desktop into the machine from another computer. So… I still don’t know what has been causing the real crashes in recent weeks.
Anyhow, after restarting the system, I logged back onto my Linux server from it, and I was presented with the usual UNIX login fortune cookies. Including one I never saw before, and one that only those can truly appreciate who used to program in FORTRAN and are familiar with implicitly declared variables and the default implicit declaration rules:
“God is real, unless declared integer.”
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