Michael's Photo Gallery - Miscellaneous

I take a lot of strange pictures. More often than not, the strangeness lies in the act of taking the picture, not the subject of the photograph itself. If most of the stuff here doesn't do anything for you, it probably wasn't intended to.

When I was at MVP-Net, we had a horde of little external modems. Not only did this make a messy stack on some shelf, but each one had an external wall transformer, and it required a lot of outlets.

I designed and built these modem cages, which mounted on a standard 19" rack. It held 30 modems, matching the ports on a Livingston Portmaster pm2e.

The power supply had three transformers in parallel to supply the needed 8 amps. A big capacitor provided much better filtering than the original power supplies. The two fans sucked air up through the cage, cooling both the modems and the power supply.

I don't normally envy farmers, but they sure have neat toys. When I saw this, I knew it would be a perfect design for an automaton (at a slightly smaller scale). One of these days I will get around to building that.
This is ancient IRC history. This would have been taken sometime in 1998, clearly April or later, about when irc.anet-stl.com first came into existance. Eeek, 57 clients.

That is the 17" monitor I used at VTI, running fvwm under Xfree86 on FreeBSD.

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