Breakfast with the family at IHOP Saturday for brunch, then to the hotel. I checked in and by the time we unloaded the car and made it to the room, discovered it wasn't a suite. Back to the front desk. The clerk didn't know what to say. "But I paid for a suite." I showed him the receipt he had just given me. He was very confused. The manager came out and made everything right. Of course at 0100 the fire alarm went off, bright strobes filling the room with white light; the klaxon blaring. Neither I, nor the children awoke. My wife roused me from my slumber, ready to snatch up the children and exit the building. "I'll be right back." I told her. I made my way down the hall towards the front desk. The alarm went silent. There was a group of young men and women standing in the foyer. One of them put his hand up and said, "It was a false alarm, you can return to your room." I stopped dead in my tracks, looked him up and down, and walked right past him. Asshole. I got the same story at the front desk, so returned to my room. This shit has happened to me before. My wife's rush of adrenaline kept her awake another hour or so while I fell back into a deep sleep. Until several hours later, when the 46-inch plasma television in our room powered itself on, once again filling the room with light and noise. I chose to sleep through this one, and at some point my wife reached for the remote and powered it off. In other words, not much rest this weekend. My parents were at a wedding the next morning, so we went shopping and drove out to visit MADDOG and pick up his gift to me, a Netra t1125:
As this is a telco box, it has no Sun PS/2 ports - so defaults to tty. Mr. MADDOG provided a USB/FIREWIRE card and I helped myself to the Raptor GFX framebuffer from the spare (read Tony's) RAVE (thanks dude) in order to bring it up with a head. Unfortunately, the USB mac keyboard via Belkin Flip KVM didn't do the trick, so when I get home today with my newly acquired Sun Microsystems USB keyboard (which, from my understanding WILL init a display) I'll have to reeingineer a few things to get back on target. If all goes well, I'll begin my build this evening.
Afterward we hit the Half-Price Bookstore where I bought the following:
- John Williams: Seven Years in Tibet (With Yo-Yo Ma on cello).
- Graeme Revell: Aeon Flux
- Run Lola Run
- Beethoven: Fidelio (the full opera)
- Silva release: The A to Z of Fantasy TV Themes - Battlestar Galactica
Some of these songs sound like cheap knock-off's, but to have some of these themes I haven't seen anywhere else is pretty cool. This is made up for however, with the Essential Zimmer I ran across. It nice to have full orchestrations of his usually synthesized work. It adds depth. Very nice.

The Sun keyboard didn't work. I pulled the USB card out of the 66MHz slot and put the framebuffer in there - still didn't work. I daisy-chained some Molex power connectors to power the firewire port on the car just in case - nothing. Mr. MADDOG is sending some serial connectors my way. I lost my terminal console during the dissolution of WDT :(