> In the evening, my dad and my uncle Jimmy convinced me that the washers I planned to use for my reset button would not solder to the power switch wires. They advised me to buy some copper washers to replace my current galvanized steel washers, or just buy a pre-made button. Not being one to cop out on my front panel's crude look, I'm opting to buy the copper washers. Tomorrow, I'll see if I can go to a plumbing store or a Home Depot after work, and find the washers I need. If I can find something to replace my power button's key ring, that would be a pleasant bonus.

12/13/2003 - I had a whole lot of project related things happen yesterday, but I was too pre-occupied with my cousin Steven to do this report then. Anyways, shortly after sunrise, I finally got my Video In to work on Candybox. It turns out that it was a driver issue, and all I did was download the latest version of ATI's program suite and an updated video driver. Now that I have this issue resolved, I can now hook up a video camera to my video card and use it to capture images on screen.

> Jennifer stopped by in the afternoon to take me to Best Buy to replace my defective copy of The Simpsons: Hit and Run. She brought over some milk bottle caps I had collected about 15 years ago, when I intended to make tokens for some purpose for some unknown reason. Nowadays, I see a new use for these milk caps. The caps are a variety of colors, including green and purple. Besides the fact that these are my two favorite colors, they are also the color codes for the mouse and keyboard PS/2 ports. I plan to cut out a washer-shaped piece of a cap of each color, and glue them over the PS/2 ports on CES's front panel. I have a green Sprite bottle cap, and I was going to wait until I had a purple bottle cap. But four days ago, discovered that my four-inch high front panel barely had enough room to accommodate a CD drive, a floppy drive, and a soda bottle cap.

> My uncle Jimmy is staying over right now, and yesterday evening, he suggested that I could get my reset button's small washer to take solder when I eventually attach the power cable to it. My dad and JD have been telling me for the past few days that this particular washer couldn't be soldered, because it's made of some kind of galvanized steel. However, Jimmy suggested I could solve this problem by sanding down the washer where the wire will be soldered.

> As soon as I finish this report, I will set my display to 800x600 and shut down, so I can hook up Candybox to the TV in the kitchen. I will then hook up my dad's camera to my video card, and bring down everything I can get a photo of. I can't use the camera to take pictures in my room, because my room is basically the only room in the house without a ceiling light, and so there's not enough light in here to do the job. It's four in the morning, so I gotta be quiet so I don't wake up my uncle or his kids.

12/9/2003 - While I was at work at Lady Foot Locker yesterday, I took a close look at how the shelves were constructed. The vertical L-shaped beams at the sides had keyhole-shaped holes all the way down their height. The L-shaped beams that went across held up the wooden shelves. They were on the inside edge of the vertical beams, and only had holes where they intercepted the vertical beams. Studying the shelves gave me a better idea on how to build the aluminum skeleton of CES. All of the beams are only going to have holes where they intercept each other, and there will be holes so the panels can be screwed into place. The panel holes on the front vertical beams will be key-shaped, allowing the front panel to come off fairly easily. The holes on two of the top horizontal beams will accommodate the hinges for the top access panel. The horizontal beams will always rest on the inner edge of the vertical ones, and will each have a small piece cut out of them so they don't overlap. All of the panels will be screwed onto the outer edges of the skeleton.

> I opened Polyfragger this morning, and found that the floppy/hard drive rack was the exact size of my hinged hard drive rack. After some careful consideration, and a whole lot of measuring, I've found that my chassis is too small to practically support my hinge design. However, I might be able to build a bay that's held into place only by three or four wingnuts. With this new design, the wingnuts can be loosened, the drive rack can be taken out, a new hard drive can be screwed into the rack, the rack can be reinserted into the chassis, and then the wingnuts can be retightened.

> I just made a major design change to CES's skeleton. I'm eliminating the three middle beams. The aluminum I'm using to build the chassis should be a very strong material, and the chassis is only 12" x 12" x 4", so it should be more than sturdy enough, even without the middle support. Losing the middle beams should cut the weight of the chassis from 6.1 pounds to just under 5.4 pounds. The chassis should also cost almost ten bucks less ($84.30 becomes $75.80).

> The motherboard power switch cable arrived in the mail today. To my great fortune, when I opened the box, there were not one, but two two-foot long cables. I tried to plug one of them into the power pins of Polyfragger's motherboard, and it fit just fine. Two days ago, I tried to get my father's video camera to work with my main rig Candybox. After slaving over my machine for several hours, I couldn't get the camera or my VCR to get a picture on my computer. But because today's package came with two cables, I can proceed to cut one of them in half, and take a picture of the other as a "before" pic.

> I put one of the power switch cables away for safe keeping before preparing the other one for use as part of my power button. I used a pair of scissors to cut it into two equal foot-long lengths. Using my tiny green Swiss Army Knife, I carefully stripped the end off of one of the halves, cut the insulating wires with the scissors, and then using the knife again, stripped the red and white wires. I then plugged in Polyfragger, replaced the power switch cable with my experimental half cable, and bridged the two exposed wires with each of the two washers of my custom reset button. The machine came to life, and turned off when I bridged the wires with the washer again. In order to test the conductivity of my power button's contact points, I wrapped one power switch wire around the key ring, then touched the copper washer to the key ring and the other wire. Again, I was able to turn the computer on and off. After my parents get back from their four day stay at my brother Peter's house, I'll ask my dad to solder the wires to my custom switches' contact points. Let's hope by then Jen either finds her camera, or I can get Candybox's Video In working so I can plug in a video camera and take a few pictures.

12/7/2003 - Today, I figured it might be best if I only had one 120GB hard drive in my system, since this should provide me with more than enough space for my purposes. I've never used a PCI to IDE adapter before, and I don't want to have to deal with learning how to use one until I really have to. Besides, hard drives weigh about one pound each, and having only one will dramatically bring down the weight of my computer. However, I will still make two extra hard drive bays in my computer, so I'll have somewhere to mount the additional drives if I should ever need any.

> I think I've come up with a good way to mount the hard drives in my computer. I will build a rack of three bays, which will be mounted just behind the front panel and on the left side of the computer. Normally, the drives will have their connectors facing to the right, where the CD and floppy drives are mounted. However, the hard drive rack will be fitted with a hinge on its left side, which will momentarily allow the hard drives' IDE connectors to face straight up, making installation a lot easier.

> I've finally decided on a name for my custom computer. From this point forward, I will call it the Creamy Entertainment System, or CES for short. This should make sense, because of the gaming console feel I'm giving to the computer, and because I'm putting my own name on it.

12/5/2003 - Today, I decided to make a quick change in the design of my reset button. I will flip the soap pump around, so that the button is pushed from the opposite end. This was actually my original design, but I didn't think I could keep the washers under the front panel that way. However, when I put the pen cap on the side with the washers, the cap added enough length to the pump for the cap to be above the front panel, while the washers could be hidden below. There are two advantages to turning the pump around; the reset button will be easier to push, and I'll now be able to make use of the pump's built-in cap by using it to mount the pump inside the case.

12/4/2003 - I went to CompUSA today, but couldn't find the CD audio cable I was looking for. When I got back home, I called JD to ask him if he had such a cable. He basically told me that a cable like that probably wouldn't fit the motherboard's pins, and even if it did, it would probably be too flimsy to handle the power needed for a motherboard power switch. JD ran a search "ATX power switch" on Google, and found some links I could use. There were two sites that sold ATX power switches with the cables attached, and another site called TacoNuts which featured a tutorial on how to build your own power switch. I found a power/reset cable at PCCables.com that is 24 inches long, and has a 2-pin port on either side, much like the CD audio cable I was going to use. I bought one of the cables for two bucks, but a five dollar UPS Ground shipping charge brought the total price to seven bucks. The plan I have for this cable is the same as the plan I had for the CD audio cable; to cut it in half in order to make two 1-foot long cables, strip the ends, then solder the ends to my power and reset buttons.

12/2/2003 - It occurred to me this morning that the VIA EIPA 800 form factor does not have any floppy drive connectors. However, the VIA EIPA V8000 motherboards do, but at the expense of one of the IDE ports. My custom computer will have two hard drives, one floppy drive, and one laptop DVD burner. Without a floppy connector, I'd have to use one of my 4 USB ports to hook up a USB floppy drive. I've instead decided to switch to the VIA EIPA V8000 form factor and use its floppy connector for a floppy drive. I will use the IDE connector for my laptop DVD burner as the slave drive, which I will fit with a CD laptop to IDE adapter, and the master drive will be a 120GB hard drive. I can't use a larger drive than that, since this motherboard only supports hard drives up to 136GB. I can buy then buy a PCI to IDE adapter, which will allow me to use more drives, each one can be over 200GB.

> I was visiting Jen and JD yesterday, and got to see my nephew Austin. I thought this would be a good opportunity to pick up their digital camera, but Jen and JD said they searched everywhere for it, but couldn't find it. So it looks like I'll have to find another way to take pictures for this project's photo log.

11/29/2003 - While shopping online during this morning's earliest hours, I found a cable that links a CD drive to a soundcard, so that you can play an audio CD on your computer. The cable is two feet long, and has a 2-pin connector on either end. I figure I can turn this audio cable into two useful one foot-long cables; a motherboard power switch cable, and a motherboard reset button cable. I can do this by cutting it in half, then stripping the ends of each half. I could then solder the exposed ends to the contact points of my custom made switches. The audio cable goes for $1.50, so if it doesn't fit the motherboard's pins, it won't be that much of a loss.

> Around dawn, my piece of shit digital camera decided to break itself on me as I was purging its pic archive. So I asked my sister Jennifer if I could borrow her digital camera for a few days, and luckily, she said yes. I need to keep a camera on me while I do this project in order to build my photo log, and it looks like that's not going to be a problem after all.