Friday, May 19, 2006

Nicknames

Ah, the wonders of the web.

While pondering it occurred to me that we didn't have a reasonable nickname for our son, and that "evil little bastard", "little horror" and even "lord foul's bairn" and other similar epithets were wearing thin.

After a bit of thought I arrived at "Bielzibabe" and the wonder of the web is such that a mere few seconds later I can confirm that it's original, or at least Google hasn't heard of it. Ah... So, it's goodbye to "what's the evil one been up to today, then" and hello "BB"...

Now all I have to do is work out what to tell her indoors it means...

Friday, May 05, 2006

Overheating

I noticed my fileserver (a bog-standard tower PC with a vertically-mounted motherboard) was down yesterday, so I wandered out (it lives outside the house, for various reasons) and power-cycled the bloody thing.

It started working, so I logged onto it had a rummage about on the disk to see if there were any traces of what stopped it. After a minute or two of this it stopped again. After various dark mutterings (it was dark) I wandered out again and went to power-cycle it again, but this time I noticed it smelled 'hot' so I dragged it inside and took the covers off. This time it wouldn't start up at all...

And eventually - never accuse me of being completely unobservant - I noticed why. All the surface mount power devices near the CPU had slipped away from their placements. The buggers must have got so hot they'd desoldered themselves and wandered off...



It's interesting that all the devices seem to have been exposed to the same temperature, so my model, which could be complete bollocks, is along the lines of the CPU fan failing (the only mechanical bit, after all) and the CPU then steadily dumping heat into the PSU devices (they're very near. The CPU is just out of shot in that photo) until they got fed up and sloped off.

I suspect the PSU was running right up until the end and the ex-FET probably died heroically as a result of its clamp diode leaving home and abandoning it... Strains of the Titanic, the music playing on as the passengers slid down the deck to their doom... What? Sorry, came over a little strange there. Been working too hard. Doesn't happen often...