Wednesday night was like any other night; the boyfriend was playing WoW and I was fiddling around on my laptop (yes, we are geeks and don't get out much. Can you tell?). Our four-year-old router had never had any problems with this in the past, but on that fateful Wednesday, at approximately 8pm, the boyfriend complained that he was getting some severe lag and was eventually disconnected from his server. I found I had also been disconnected from the internet and on looking at the router, its lights were all switched off.

Odd, it was acting like the power had been switched off, which wasn't the case. No amount of switching plugs/sockets/anything would have it come back on. A friend poked it and managed to get it to come back to life, telling me it looked like a fuse had gone inside it. Alas, while the lights were on, no one was home - dear old router would not connect to the internet but seemed ok acting as a switch between computers. By this time, I'd dug out our 7-year-old BT modem with one port on it which enabled us to get back online... one at a time. And don't even think about using the USB attachment with anything other than Windows XP (which we don't have) - I had almost forgotten what the Blue Screen Of Death looked like but I've built up enough reserves of it while trying to use that thing to last me a while. My genius idea of using the dead router as a switch with the BT modem somewhat worked... As long as I was ok being tethered to said router (er, no) and that again, only one person wanted to use the net at once. Conclusion: switch also dead.

What with various emergency trips to France (my grandmother is not well :( ), funds are not exactly great at present so today it was off to the local overpriced PC shop to get whatever was cheapest. Came back with an almost identical model to the last one, but this one seems to have two aerials, better speeds and has some super duper secure something-or-other setting. The advantage of it being pretty much the same meant that I could restore a backup of the settings on the old router and get up and running in minutes without the need to redo all the security and setting up new passwords on all our wireless devices (ick).

Phew. RIP, Netgear DG834GT. You served us well.

In other news, I have rejoined The Q*Bee after (almost) 2 years. W00t! Come trade with me! :D
Oh, and Lucy recovered fine from her surgery :) The cone came off a couple of days after the last entry and we had no problems since. She's been bouncy ever since :D

It appears to be 2010. Now then... How is one to pronounce that? Twenty-ten? Two-thousand-and-ten? I have to say I'm leaning more towards the former but the latter sounds nicer.

This year I have 0 resolutions because I never make any, but I do hope to achieve some things in the next 12 months, including losing some sort of weight and becoming fitter - but considering I ate half a large cheesecake yesterday, that will probably not happen. Mmm, cheesecake. :9 I also have a wedding to plan and go through with and a holiday to Florida to go on. :D

So, happy 2010 to one and all, hope it brings you happiness and whatever else you wish for. :)

You know how I said I shouldn't be allowed near a computer?

Someone remove the things from me, because I KEEP BREAKING THEM.

Let's see. I was at work the other day, and a computer's power supply failed. I replaced it, but in doing so had to unplug one of the cooling fans because it was in the way of a cable I needed to remove. Problem was, the inside of the computer was so dusty I couldn't see where I was meant to plug it back in. I sprayed some compressed air around a bit to clean it up and all was well, right? Wrong. In doing that I'd fried the motherboard. -_-

Fast forward to this morning. My old laptop has Linux on it, and I boot it up every now and then to do some geeky stuff on it. Today was one of those days - it had been unused for 2 weeks, nothing out of the ordinary for it as it's sat for months without being touched. I put it on and - BEEP BEEP BEEP FIZZ FIZZ BANG. Smoke starts coming from everywhere. D: D: D: It went no further than that, thankfully, but I can assure you the thing's dead :P Looks like there was a short circuit of some kind... Yeah. RIP laptop :(

So, that's computer #4 I've killed (Well, it's the same as #1 really, but seeing as it's a different motherboard and stuff, I'm counting it as a different computer), and #2 this week. Some might say I'm getting rather good at this.

I'm going to get the hell away from this computer (current laptop) before it too explodes. I have no idea how I managed to build a PC without frying it (been going one month so far, and everything seems ok :S) as I don't really seem to be cut out for this whole thing.

Yeah. Excuse me while I go into hiding now...

Edit: I took the whole thing apart and it seems the connection between the motherboard and the power inlet has burnt out - I took some pics if you're at all interested (yes, I'm sad like that), they can be seen on Flickr.

Bear in mind this computer was by no means well, so it dying completely was probably not something that should have come as much of a surprise. I dropped water on this thing too many times to count, almost broke its processor, dropped it/knocked it more than I dropped water on it (and that's saying something), took it on holiday several times to different climates it probably didn't like... Add to that the fact that its screen backlight was going, its power connection was loose (yes, probably should have remembered that before using it today -_- ), the motherboard had already fried itself once and been replaced, and the battery had died about 3 or 4 years ago. Nonetheless, it's sad to see it go - it was my 18th birthday present and my first computer that was really mine. It was 6 years old and for a cheap, generic model, that's about 2 years more than I would have expected it to last with me as its owner anyway :P