Everyone remember the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Screen Saver many of us were/are/had run?  Well it turns out the project has reached a milestone and now has 150 signals to start 'investigating'.  Here's a little snippet from the Post: "A hunt by scientists and owners of home computers worldwide to find extraterrestrial life has been narrowed to 150 signals from space.  The signals have been identified as the source of possible transmissions from intelligent civilizations and are the result of five billion signals being analyzed by four million computers.  "This is the culmination of more than three years of computing, the largest computation ever done," David Anderson, a UC Berkeley computer scientist professor, said. "It's a milestone for the SETI@home project."  SETI@home was started in 1999 with the idea of harnessing the processing power of people's home computers while the machines were idle.  "The remarkable thing about SETI is the membership is worldwide, roughly half comes from the Unites States and there is a lot from Germany, Japan and a lot from Canada," Mr. Anderson said in an interview yesterday.

Well I for one think that's rather cool...  There's an Abattoir.Net group that was started on the SETI@home Server, we had over 20 machines crunching numbers for years (...I think there's still a few here that are running it now...)  Just to be curious, I checked, the Abattoir Group has over 7,000hrs of computation time logged on the only machine left in the listing, not too shabby!

Anyone out there in need of a fine dishwasher?  My Frigidaire Gallery Series 'Ultra Quiet II' decided that after four years (...and four months past the motor warranty...) that it was tired of being Ultra Quiet.  It must have caught wind of what the computer upstairs did with the SCSI Cable and thought, if the computer could get away with it, I'll start squealing too...  Apparently it's time to sacrifice more appliances in front of others, they're starting to get cocky again (...if you recall, a certain hi-fi VCR thought it would be 'cute' to try and eat one of MeatMan's favourite tapes a while back, but soon found itself being beat into hundreds of little bits right in the middle of the Abattoir Lab so ALL the equipment could witness...)  Out came the infidel appliance and in went a new Whirlpool 'Ultra Mega Way More Quiet III' (...gimmie' a break...)  So other than needing a new pump motor, this other one's good to go.  If there's no takers, we'll wire it up in LAN Central and use it to clean the palm-plaque off SoDa's mouse and keyboard, or perhaps we can cut a hole in the top and mount a toilet seat in it...  That would be a bidet even Tim Taylor would be proud of.

Ever hear an odd sound from your computer?  The main machine at the Abattoir started making fan noise late one night, rather than address the issue that instant, I staggered to bed for a peaceful nights sleep...  I awoke the next morning to a machine whose fan squeal had changed to a whine.  Hmm, I'm also getting read errors on SCSI-1...  Months and months back, my machine's power supply fan took a dive, not having the same oversized cooling fan in the Abattoir's extensive 'Parts Department' (…which now has another power supply, Team-Speciel…), I decided to Red Green it...  I took a case fan and duct taped it to the underside of the power supply.  After opening my case that morning, horrors of horrors, duct tape had failed me!  The tape dropped the fan which took a dive into my $170 SCSI Controller Cable and proceeded to attack it like a circular saw.  End result, one cut cable, or "SCSI Terminated" as I prefer to say.  DieJestor jumped in the car and proceeded to drive all over hell's half acre to find a shop that carried SCSI cables...  Thanks to Mike (LoSt) Rowe at Summit Direct, DieJestor's fourth stop for helping us out, and of course, a big thanks to DieJestor for the hunt!  As for the rest of you 'computer shops' out there...  Ever hear of SCSI?
 
True to our words below, the Abattoir's SuperFTP Server has been switched over!  If you can't get on, you didn't read the last Update. (see below)  Also a word of note, the "Quickie Leaf's Schedule" has been redone, it now features links directly to each and every teams official home page, as well, expired games will now be showing win/loss/score info in place of game time.  If you ever want a quick check to see when/where/who the Leafs will be dealing with next, give it a shot!  There's a link on the Main Page as well as the top of the LAN Minutes.