dabgotra.com

In this past month:

1. MacBook hard drive failed
2. VOIP line at home has been a complete POS, but I think that’s due more to Shaw and their “Quality of Service” BS than anything (they throttle VOIP traffic to push people to their own Shaw Digital Phone offering. Sounds great! And it’s only 4 times the price? Sign me up!
3. 2 weeks ago, we were woken up in the middle of the night by some incessant beeping coming from the office. I wandered over, and it turned out that the humble server running this website had issues. The CPU fan had stopped working, and the hardware monitor was (thankfully) alerting of the failure. Any more than a few minutes without a CPU fan and the processor goes up in smoke. A quick fan swap the next day and all was fine.
4. My MacBook is showing some of that discolouration issue that has plagued may other MacBook users. Something about the type of plastic they use is more porous and susceptible to yellowing over a few weeks, but it’s a known problem by Apple. Long story short, I’ll have to send it in AGAIN soon to get the palm-rest area of the laptop replaced
5. Speaking of Apple issues, the 3-year-old worthless-sitting-in-a-drawer battery on Trophy Wife’s iBook was part of the Apple Battery Recall program, so that was sent back and in return a brand new $160 battery was given by Apple. Woo hoo! Thank you Sony for your exploding batteries!
6. Today, I’m sitting in the office about to do some work and notice a strange smell. Burnt something-or-another. I don’t have the best sense of smell (which is quite ironic for those that know me) so I call the smell-master-3000 over to check it out. Yep, something’s on fire in the office.
   
   
   We immediately unplug everything — lamps, power adapters, computers, everything. After much sniffing around, we narrowed the smell down to one of the Linux boxes (specifically, the Ubuntu network-backup box that everything gets RSYNC’d to nightly)
   
   After unscrewing the panel, a few chips fall out of the case, having melted right off of the motherboard. A couple more looked ready to go had we not shut the machine down. Not only did the plastic of the chips melt (causing the burning smell), but they got hot enough to de-solder themselves off the board.
   
   
   I don’t think it would’ve started a fire, but luckily we were home and able to react quickly.

Sheesh. Like I said — no love from the hardware gods lately.