Yesterday started badly, inasmuch as I woke up at 9.30, sat down at my PC, and found that it had rebooted during the night. That alone isn’t so abnormal – once before Windows Update decided that an update it was applying needed a restart *right* *now*, and so rebooted the machine, but I’d disabled that option since. So I log in, and I find that I have no sound. Programs that use sound recording (like Skype) are giving errors. There do not appear to be any sound devices present on the machine.

Shit.

I reboot; nothing. I reinstall sound drivers; still nothing.

Shit.

I then happen to glance through the window in my case, and note that the chipset cooling fan and heatsink is resting peacefully on the case floor, thoroughly detached from the chip it is supposed to be chilling.

Fuck.

Cue the fastest shutdown operation in recent history.
I pop open the case and gingerly feel around. I touch the chip in question, and it’s cool. This is the first good sign, but it goes unnoticed in the general panic. I curse the bastard who designed the cooler (an Akasa AK-210 with a pretty blue LED); for thinking that a fan and heatsink could be secured on to a vertical chip with only a sticker. I try sticking the cooler back on. It stays, until I hit the power button, when the infinitesimally small jolt of the fan springing into life causes it to detach from the chip once again. I start trying to think of ways to attach it. Eventually I decide to try to locate some thermal paste, cursing the fact that all my hardware bits and bobs are at home. I walk over to Lazer Lizard – what passes for a computer shop on campus. I ask the cashier, “this may be a long shot, but do you have any thermal paste?” I receive a strange look. “It’s a sort of goo,” I offer, but no, she responds, they don’t.

Walking back, I realise that laying the PC on its side will probably work, as the cooler will just sit on the chip, unencumbered by gravity. Once home, I do this, and it’s working fine so far. Plus all my cool LEDs are projected skywards, which looks sweeter than before. After booting up, the sound was working again (it was that chip), so I can only assume that the mainboard shuts the chip off if it gets too hot on boot. No lasting damage, thank fuck.

Yesterday was deadline day for CS118 Coursework 1 (Java). I got mine finished on Sunday night, and submitted with the nifty online system.

The coursework centred around the Warwick Maze environment, which provides a graphical maze and the hooks needed to interact with it. Our part was to create a series of increasingly complex controller modules for the robot.

The marking method was refreshingly personal – once I showed up at my allotted slot, I sat down with one of the postgrad tutors, and we went through each exercise in the coursework. He looked through my code; I told him why I’d done certain things the way I had, and how the complicated bits worked. Then he ticked off various criteria on his marking sheet. It took about 5 minutes in total, and I ended up with 135/135 :-D. This after getting soaked in the rain, and having major PC trouble (which will be covered in another post :-)), it was an upshot to a day that started poorly.

An amusing little piece from TG Daily covering some scary and/or comic clauses in various software End User License Agreements (EULAs).

So, my first accomplishment this morning has been… to buy a unicycle! :-D

Yesterday afternoon me and Vicky went over to the Union to get some ingredients (and some cough drugs for me :-() and in the piazza there were a whole load of people doing various circus-type things, like juggling, diablo’ing, and crucially, unicycle-riding. I couldn’t bring myself to have a go there and then (I didn’t have the right shoes on, of course :-P), but I looked on eBay this morning and lo! only £40 inc. P&P. Who could resist?

Oh shh. Thanks to the wonders of e-banking, it doesn’t feel like real money. And that’s what matters!

A message went out on the Peacefire mailing list this morning, announcing a new public “Circumventor” site at stupidcensorship.com. The site is running CGIProxy, which I’ve found to be a decent bit of kit, so all the downtrodden students in need of uncensored web access should give this a go.