Slowly, he struggled through the snowbank.

Deductive logic reveals: the freezes seen on Bellerophon are hardware related. Mysterious freezes of all system activity, including video to the screen, under:

* an organically maintained install of OS X 10.1.x;
* a clean install of OSX 10.1.x;
* a clean install of OSX 10.2;
* an updated install of OSX 10.2.1;
* and also under CD-ROM boots of both 10.1 and 10.2.
Thus far, I have not observed the freezes under any OS 9 flavor, but admittedly, I’ve not really banged on it under the venerable OS.

A quick google (not comprehensive, mind you) reveals a few anecdotes of initial series Wallstreets giving up the ghost in similar fashion, under OS X. My Intuiton (TM) tells me it’s the CPU card.

Lucky for me, eBay reveals Wallstreet 233mhz CPU cards going for an guesstimated average of $20-25 each. So I can warehouse the suckers.

For now, I’ve redirected back over to the 9500. Hopefully I can get things rolling again soon on Bellerophon. It’s frustrating: the CPU heats up when performing cloning operations or heavy disk-writes – i.e., the things most required at installation time – and locks. Ah well. It’s a larnin’ thang, intended to be the equivalent of building a car out of spare parts, the proverbial chewing gum, and a dab of sealing wax. Perhaps tonight I’ll dig up some alchemical incantation to see if I can transmute the overheated parts of the CPU into something with better heat-management capacities. Base into noble form.

Oh, and Jason’s show was lovely. This year we were led about a mile through some woods and to a tree where he was wrapped into a cocoon and tied to the bole, in apparent hibernation, to emerge again come spring. Never have you seen 400 young people out in the woods at midnight remain so very quiet.