Strangeness, but I'll take it.

[vakkotaur]

I was about to dig into belgian to see how bad things were but I switched it on and powered it up to see if all the fans would spin and if the drive spun... and it beeped. It came up, but somehow I lost the ability to switch the KVM selection. Not good. I really like that Compaq KVM. After swapping cables around so that I could shut both belgian and percheron down cleanly, I hoped it was just a keyboard going flaky at the most confusing time.

It was. The good part of this is that there is no shortage of spare keyboards. There's a big box of the things in the machine room closet. I might go through a few until I find one I really like. The first one I tried was a true old IBM keyboard that could double as a weapon. Right now I'm trying some no-name Microsoft certified thing that looked good at first, but the rows seem to bowed UP instead of down so it feels a bit weird.

I'm a bit leery of things (belgian) just working again. It leaves me wondering what really went amiss and when it will happen again. But if all I need to replace is a keyboard when there are bunch of spares, I can't argue too much.

The *pop* the other day was likely from the machine room. That's where the burnt popcorn smell was, and Jay's IBM 3196 (terminal for the AS/400) now screams though it still functions.