heh, I almost had you there. But seriously, here is a very long story below:
My computer died last night, it was very sad. At approximately 10:40PM, while reading email, my computer suffered some sort of nerve damage and went crazy. Firefox went full screen, and random numbers and letters flooded my email box. I thought I was hacked.
"Impossible!" I thought, as I scrambled to hit the kill switch. "My security is enough to keep out a blackhat!" (and no, its probably not)
Flipping the switch, the power went dead as the dimmed lights in my room flickered. Gaining my confidence, I blamed it on a bug in Gran Paradiso, the Firefox 3.0 alpha I recently installed. But as I powered up the computer, I learned it was a much much worse than a simple program bug.
My computer started clicking. I mean, like the sound a harddrive makes when all hell breaks loose. I start panicing, and immediately hit the switch again.
"Oh ****" I mumble, as a I hoped that my main HD wasnt dead. If it was, then the last 2 months of code go with it. (no, I dont use SVN). As I looked into the computer, I saw no bumping fans. I unplugged my speakers and one harddrive and tried again (i wasnt sure which one). Clicking continued.
I unplugged the second hard drive....
clicking continued. I sighed in relief, my data was probably still there. But then I realized that it would have been better if it was a hard drive than a motherboard or processor problem. This was because I uploaded half my code to the backup server a half an hour before, and I happen to be quite poor (no job). If I lost a hard drive, even my main one, I can pull one out of my other... 3 computers laying around. If I lose my processor/motherboard, I would have to revert to a 1 ghz iBook running ubuntu which I have to return to my job in a month, or my 600mhz batterieless, cd rom less, floppyless, ethernet less, HP laptop which I got for a very good price many years ago.
I frantically began pulling out my PCI cards (much like that computer guy in Goldeneye), until I only had my video, RAM, and processor. Keyboard and mouse were still plugged in. I flipped the switch.
Click, Click, Click... Clickity, Clickity, Click.
"Noooooooooo" bad news for me.
At this point in time, It was already 11 PM, and I spent the whole day writing even more essays, and the night before I only got 5 hours of sleep. And to top it off, my room was around 80-85 degrees due to it being the damn summer, and the air conditioner not being on. And im on the top story.
I leave it, and decide my sleep is worth more. I pull out my Zune, to listen to the radio. Like a gift, the radio station just began playing the whole new Linkin Park CD from start to finish, two days before release! I was ecstatic. Great CD, btw.
--
anyway, to make a long story short, I spilled a water/sprite mixture (I like sprite very cold, thus lots of ice) on my keyboard a half an hour before this incident. I pulled the keys out, and dried it, and it seemed to work fine. I forgot the incident.
Little did I know, that a half an hour later, the water seeped into the circuit board. Thus, firefox going crazy, and lots of weird text. In the morning, it dried, so when I turned on my computer half awake, it didn't click. At all.
So it seems like the keyboard was sending crazy signals to the motherboard, which was reading them as "oh no, send kill!" Once it dried, no more kill, no more click.
Anyway, the moral of the story is to not be poor, backup your files, and dont place a glass of ice/sprite on top of a pile of papers ontop of your xbox, which is on your desk next to your keyboard. Bad things could happen.
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