I just got back into the office this morning roughly an hour ago. I’m currently typing this up on a Linux box which is not my main development machine, because my main development machine just went up in a puff of acrid smoke. It turns out that in the four days I was not in the office they lost 3 machines to exactly the same symptops (laptop reacts like a PC which just got unplugged, acrid smoke pours out the back, hard disk data fine but internal components BBQed). Now, I don’t know, after losing $10,000 of hardware I personally would have, hmm, tried to isolate the cause of the problem before frying additional machines but, hey, thats why I’m an engineer and not management. A bit of whining and “Hey, boss, I took an electrical engineering course in college. Maybe the socket here is getting power spikes” (the first is technically not a lie, although the extent of my electrical engineering experience is designing half-adders and I was terrible at it) got someone to actually bust out a voltmeter and measure our outlets. “Ha, ha, good thing nothing was plugged in here, otherwise your computers would be yakiniku.” (Yakiniku = a delicious Japanese dish which involves taking raw meat, basting it in delectable herbs and spices, and then burning the heck out of it.) “Well, actually, the reason we have no computers plugged in on this table is that they are all yakiniku.” “You’re not serious.” boggles the electrical guy.
Well, to make a long story short, the odds of me meeting my day job’s next deadline are now about 10,000:1 against (100% of my team is now idled) and I get a day or two to catch up on blogging.
