Today I've read this article in the Romanian press about a dog "shelter" where animal protection organisations found hundreds of dead dogs. They have tried to enter to investigate as did the news and later the police. What I found interesting is the reaction of the people there: they barricaded themselves inside and refused access even to the police. They panicked, yes, but it was more than that.

I believe it was the shock felt by people who do some atrocious thing because they were ordered to or because they didn't know what they were in for. They start doing it and realize almost immediately that they can't possibly want this. But they continue to do it because a) they started already and stopping would be an admission of guilt and fault b) people around them do the same thing c) someone said it was the right thing to do. It all falls apart when other people try to examine what they did, though, as they realize, imagining what others would think, that they cannot possibly get over what they did. As they had projected responsibility on their superiors, now they project anger and rejection on the witnesses of their actions. But they actually hate themselves in those moments.

In the end, no one cares what the reason was. Maybe the official explanation that they were all terminally ill dogs is correct after all. But the emotional trauma felt by the people that did this, looking those animals in the eyes and then killing them while the barks of dogs turn to frightened squeals as they run from corner to corner in sheer terror, from this inability to care for random animals and people that work for you, from this I would make a story worth publishing.

It started brilliantly: a Stargate series off-shoot that takes place in a very distant galaxy on a ship that runs itself with a bunch of stranded humans on it. And Robert Carlyle plays the role of the grumpy scientist! The feel of the show moves away from green pastures and ridiculous Goa'uld with their Jaffa and their sticks and goes to a much darker place where human nature and politics define the game, not only blazing heroism and implausible luck.

And then... people wanted their fucking green pastures! The ratings were in the millions, but still not enough for the greedy networks who decided to cancel the show. To be honest, it is not only the fault of idiotic executives and imbecile TV viewers, but also of the show writers. But the number of solid episodes so outnumbers the number of faulty ones that the blame cannot in good faith be attributed to the people working on the show. The actors played well, the scripts were mostly interesting and consistent. There were no self referential or parody episodes at all and the humour was left to the situation, not the mandatory smart quote before springing into action.

Of course, the potential of the show was mostly wasted in the so many average episodes in which they found a stargate, dialed in, then proceeded with the almost the same ideas as in the other Stargate shows, but there was a major difference even then: people has their own agendas, they pondered on their role in all of this, not just acted like automatons playing the same part over and over.

So yes, I think this show could have benefited from the slowly rising tide of people that don't watch shows the first time they air, but much later, when they ask their friends "do you know any good sci-fi series?" and someone answers "Have you seen Stargate Universe? It's awesome!". But no. If random morons who wouldn't understand a stick if it didn't hit them with the end they expect don't like the show, it must be cancelled. I've heard people react to Universe with repulsion and even hate. "It is not in the spirit of the Stargate shows that I liked!", they said. Well, I am sorry to tell you, but that spirit is the spirit of Harry Potter, Tom and Jerry and Prince Charming: impossible situations with incredible solutions from people that cannot exist. The ever successful recipe of "heroic people with which you would identify [for no real reason] battle the odds and succeed every time. And they do it smiling!" it nothing but a fairy tale. You are watching bed time stories. And yes, I want my bed time stories as well, but not the three year old ones!

I dedicate this post to so many people that believed they thought they understood Stargate Universe and similar shows that got cancelled for no good reason: you are idiots!

A bit late to the party, I finally found out that there was a mass escape from a Khanadahar prison. Apparently, Taliban forces have dug a tunnel from outside the Afghan prison and liberated about 500 of their peers. This is a blow to the local government and their western allies, the news say. I, however, cannot help but root a little for the underdog and think of the classic The Great Escape. In that film, allied prisoners of war were digging a tunnel to escape Nazis. Will they do a similar film about the Talibans now? I would. It would probably be both funny and tragic, navigating through all the incompetence, corruption, shrewdness and tension. As for the "western allies"... I would be a little proud. "Look, ma! They have grown so much, our children! They are not blowing themselves up, they are organising, planning for months in advance and finally building something. It's just a tunnel now, but I am so proud!".

Bruce Schneier says in his TED talk about security: I tell people "If it's in the news, don't worry about it", 'cause by definition, news is something that almost never happends. It is a great concept, although not completely correct. The switch from one state to another may not happen very often, but you are often worried whether you are in that state or not. But overall I agree and I have to say that it is a great news filter idea: just ignore news that are not about a change in state.

I will be going in vacation this Easter, so I won't be around until the 2nd of May. I apologize beforehand for the spam comments that I usually delete as they appear. Have a nice relaxing Easter holiday! Cause when you return to work, all hell has broken loose :)

Short version: open registry, look for file association entry, locate the command subkey and check if, besides the (Default) value, there isn't a command multistring value that looks garbled. Rename or remove it.

Now for the long version. I've had this problem for a long time now: trying to open an Office doc file by double clicking it or selecting "Open" from the context menu or even trying "Open with" and selecting WinWord.exe threw an error that read like this: This action is only valid for installed products. This was strange, as I had Office 2007 installed and I could open Word just fine and open a document from within; it only had problems with the open command.

As I am rarely using Office at home, I didn't deem it necessary to solve the problem, but this morning I've decided that it is a matter of pride to make it work. After all, I have an IT blog and readers look up to me for technical advice. Both of them. So away I go to try to solve the problem.

The above error message is so looked up that it came up in Google autocomplete, but the circumstances and possible solutions are so varied that it didn't help much. I did find an article that explained how Office actually opens up documents. It said to go in the registry and look in the HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Word.Document.12\shell\Open\command subkey. There should be a command line that looks like "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\WINWORD.EXE" /n /dde. The /dde flag is an internal undocumented flag that tells Windows to use the Dynamic Data Exchange server to communicate the command line arguments to Word, via the next key in the registry: HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Word.Document.12\shell\Open\ddeexec which looks like: [REM _DDE_Direct][FileOpen("%1")]. So in other words (pun not intended) WinWord should open up with the /n flag, which instructs to start with no document open, then execute the FileOpen command with the file provided. If I had this as the value of the command registry key, it should work.

Ok, opened up the registry editor (if you don't know what that is or how to use it, it is my recommendation to NOT use it. instead ask a friend who knows what to do. You've been warned!), went to where the going is good and found the command subkey. It held a (Default) value that looked like it should and then it held another value named also command, only this one was not a string (REG_SZ), but a multi string (REG_MULTI_SZ), and its value was something like C84DVn-}f(YR]eAR6.jiWORDFiles>L&rfUmW.cG.e%fI4G}jd /n /dde. Do not worry, there is nothing wrong with your monitor, I control the horizontal, vertical and diagonal, it looked just as weird as you see it. At first I thought it was some weird check mechanism, some partial hash or weird encoding method used in that weird REG_MULTI_SZ type, which at the moment I didn't know what it meant. Did I mention it was weird? Well, it turns out that a multi string key is a list of strings, not a single line string, so there was no reason for the weirdness at all. You can see that it was expecting a list of strings because when you modify the key it presents you with a multiline textbox, not a singleline one.

So, thank you for reading thus far, the solution was: remove all the annoying command values (NOT the command subkeys) leaving the (Default) to its normal state. I do not know what garbled the registry, but what happened is that Windows was trying to execute the strange string and, obviously, failed. The obscure error message was basically saying that it didn't find the file or command you were trying to execute and has nothing to do with Office per se.

Of course,you have to repeat the procedure for all the file types that are affected, like RTF, for example.

Who needs time consuming trips to other countries when you can have it all here, on Siderite's blog, embedded in a blog post? Of course, if you would like the real deal (Hmpf!) don't hesitate to contact me. I can guarantee very good prices and the total trustworthiness of the people there. (Both Silverlight and Photosynth have been somewhat discontinued since the time I wrote this)

You can('t) access the same Photosynth by clicking on this link: Villa in Kyparissi, Greece on Photosynth.

Now, before you start thinking I've gone into tourism marketing, let me explain the technology, what is Photosynth and how to use it.

Photosynth is a Microsoft Research baby and one of the things that they should be terribly proud of, even if not many people have heard of it. I blame this on bad marketing and the stubbornness on using Silverlight only. If you are to read the Wikipedia article, the technology works in two steps. The first step is photo analysis with an algorithm similar to Scale-invariant feature transform for feature extraction. By analyzing subtle differences in the relationships between the features (angle, distance, etc.), the program identifies the 3D position of each feature, as well as the position and angle at which each photograph was taken. This process is known scientifically as Bundle adjustment. You can see it in action if you go to the villa and chose to see the point cloud. The second step is, obviously, navigating the data through the Photosynth viewer.

Now, how does one use it? Surprisingly simple. First take a bunch of photos that overlap themselves. You can use multiple cameras, multiple view angles and times of day, which of course does complicate matters, but the algorithm should be able to run smoothly. Then download the Photosynth software from their site (make sure you have an account there as well) and feed the photos to it. Wait a while (depending on how many photos and their quality) and you are done. I especially liked the option to find the place in the synth on Bing maps and select the angle of one picture in order for it to determine the real location of the objects in the photos. It will also use geographic information embedded in the pictures, if available.

There are, of course, problems. One of the major ones is that it is all done through the Photosynth site. You cannot save it on your HDD and explore it offline. Also, it is not possible to refine the synthing process manually. If your pictures are not good enough, that's it. You will notice, for example, that none of the images rotated to 90 degrees were joined to any others or that there is no correlation between the images of the house outside and those inside. One cannot remove or block pictures in the synth, either. Being all closely connected to the Silverlight viewer also reduces the visibility of the product to the outside world even if, let's face it, I have edited the Photosynth by adding highlights and geographic position and I have navigated it all in the Chrome browser, not Internet Explorer, so if you refuse to install Silverlight to see it, it's a personal problem.

I hope I have opened your eyes to this very nice and free technology and if you are interested in a vacation to the place, just leave me a message on the chat or in a comment. If you have read to this point, you also get a 10% discount, courtesy of yours truly :)

Somehow I have managed to read the tenth and final book in Steven Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen series: The Crippled God. Almost a year ago I was saying "I doubt the tenth book will be able to satisfyingly end the story." and I have to agree with myself :)

The book continues where Dust of Dreams ended, but introduces even more characters, all amassing towards a grand finale. But is it grand? And is it, or should it be, a finale? I dare say no, but first a little bit about the content of the book.

The adjunct Tavore does for the entire book things that not even the characters understand. More than that, they follow her, all the time acknowledging that they don't know why. While this may work for short periods of time, it gets annoying and breaks one of the tenets of book writing: allow the reader to sympathize with the characters. How can you, if you don't understand what they are doing? Combine that with Erikson's style of beginning chapters without disclosing who the characters are and having to wait for a few paragraphs before using any names, and you get a book that is hard to enjoy without giving it all your attention. And when you do, people start sobbing and having "raw feelings" and understanding a world of pain from a single word and what not.

To summarize, I believe Erikson finally succumbed to the writer curse of trying to force the reader to think like him. In the end, the pleasure of understanding the situation explain by the author and filling in the blanks with your own imagination is replaced with a vast blank instead.

Then there are the tactical situations. After a rather interesting campaign in Letheras in Dust of Dreams we get a long pointless march that makes no sense whatsoever, problems created for no reason and bad solutions for them. The enemy, the Forkrul Assail, are nothing more than glorified Nazis, running around and spreading their own brand of justice, but having small and clichéd thoughts and not much in the way of actual power. They draw extra power from the heart of the Crippled God in order to boost their grand Akhrast Korvalain magic, but when it is time to unleash it, it pretty much duds, making the reader wonder what the hell happened. Also the military strategy makes no sense whatsoever, down to the individual battles. That could have slipped if Erikson wouldn't have slipped of how Tavore is the greatest strategist of all time. I won't bore you with the details, let's just say that there is much more sobbing than thinking in this book.

And now to return to the grand finale. Not only did I not understand much of it (maybe I am too dumb, who knows?) but it fizzled in comparison to most of the previous books. The battle was not that grandiose, the scheming something only a god would understand, the characters rather bland, the sobbing (did I mention it?), even the Malazan marine was boring in this book. I did enjoy it, but it all felt rushed and soulless. A lot less than I have imagined the ending of this great series to be.

The last qualm I have is with another writer trap: the desire to finish up in a clean way. It has to end with Apsalar in her village and the two meddling Shadow gods like the first book began. It had to end a lot of the pieces of stories sprinkled throughout the books. It had to save people that suffered and have couples reunited. This could have worked for a romantic comedy with werewolves, for example, but not for a series of books that never wasted time on finding boring beginnings and useless endings for its many threads.

The ending of the book betrayed the eight preceding books and some of Ian Cameron's. Perhaps the many voices of the characters always whispering in Steven Erikson's ears for twenty years have finally driven him mad. Or maybe he just got bored.

Ok, time for a summary of TV shows I have wasted my time with since I've written the last post. As usual, my opinion is king and everybody else's sucks... or so I think the usual disclaimer should have sounded. So, here it the dough:

• Doctor Who, Torchwood and even The Sarah Jane Adventures - these British shows are a bit ridiculous, but they are meant to be. I continue to watch them. Torchwood is the only one that goes towards the classic team of professionals battling the forces of evil or whatever, so it was bought by the American Starz channel. The other two are goofy and non violent, which is what I actually like about the Who concept.
• Eureka - nothing has changed, really. There were some stirrings in the storyline, where time travel has changed the future and only some of the people involved are aware of it. I think it's a courageous thing to do in a story, but also a pretty lame cop-out for previous script errors. It's all in the motivation, really.
• House MD - wife watches it, I mainly just fall asleep at it. It has become almost completely non medical and totally confusing. Did you catch the one minute romantic relationship between Cuddy and House? OMFG, OMFG!.. not
• Criminal Minds and Criminal Minds - Suspect Behavior - I like Thomas Gibson and I have always felt like he was the one "making" the Criminal Minds show. What better way to test that theory than make a Criminal Minds spin-off, while taking him almost off the original series episodes? The result is a slightly more boring Criminal Minds and a horrible, horrible Suspect Behavior. And the thing is, I like Forest Whitaker and Janeane Garofalo, so I can't for the life of me understand how a spin-off of a show I like starring these two can fail so miserably!
• Dexter - the show went in a rather boring direction for a while. I mean, you start with a serial killer and you make him a father of three that has a family, all the while trying to make it exciting. Yes, he was almost caught a thousand times and each time the solution was more and more outrageous. Towards the end of season 5 it seemed as Dexter was back on track killing people, but who knows that they will do to him in the sixth season? The latest Dexter book is about cannibals. Yumm!
• Big Love - this show started as interesting, mostly because it was about a culture I know nothing about: polygamist Mormons, and because it starred Bill Paxton. Towards the end, though, it became so repetitive, with all kinds of moronic twists to keep the viewer interested, that I never got the will to watch it end. The episodes of season 5, last of the series, are waiting for me to watch them.
• Fringe - Peter and Fauxlivia are having a baby! Yay! Once I stopped bitching about how lame the show is, how ridiculous the science and how bad the scripts are, I actually enjoyed it. The best show to end a hard day or to start a morning when nothing seems to work. It requires no brain power to watch. Actually, having brain power available makes it unwatchable.
• True Blood - I still enjoy the series, mostly because people are making an effort to act well and keep the script interesting. Also because I started liking it for the vampire/werewolf Louisiana atmosphere mixing the supernatural with the superstupid and the superredneckness and they are still going strong. (yeah, I make up words as I go along)
• Californication - the original smartness of the character spiced with a little sex turned into a lot of gratuitous sex and not too much smartness, but then it turned both sex and smartness up. (What a turn on!) I can't say if that is good or bad, but I've watched season 5 and I am looking forward to the sixth
• Secret Diary of a Call Girl - the show ended, but left avenues open for a continuation. Billie Piper playing a prostitute was a guilty pleasure in itself, but the show was actually very enjoyable. The last season was not nearly as good as the ones preceding so I guess it is a good thing the series ended when they did.
• Entourage - can one keep a show consistent for eight seasons? A lot of people have tried, not many actually succeeded. I enjoy Entourage still, but I feel that the original spunk and friendly youthful energy of the show has dwindled to nothing. Let's see what happens in the eighth and last season.
• Stargate Universe - used to the other two Stargate shows, I was expecting that the last episodes of Universe be ridiculous, self referential, "screw you, we are done" style, below average quality episodes. But no! They are actually going strong and some of the mid season script and acting is making me angry for the show's cancellation. Whoever heard of great episodes in mid season AND when the show is cancelled? Blasphemy!
• V - the second season (and probably last) ended up in a Mortal Kombat way: Shao Khan wins, muhahahahaha! It was a no brainer, really, and I won't feel bad whether it continues or not. The things that I found funny was to use some of the actors in the original series. (yes, indeed, there was another V series in 1983. And yes, I was old enough to watch it then and I did watch it and I don't really care if you don't watch anything created before 1990 :-P )
• Men Of A Certain Age - the show is still smart, funny and tasteful. I keep wondering why is it still on. I can't wait for the second half of the second season
• Weeds - I have to agree with the wife here: enough is enough. The show isn't even about marijuana anymore! And it gets more and more ridiculous by the episode.
• The Good Wife - another great Tony and Ridley Scott work, pun not really intended. Characters are consistent, complex, while the story keeps me interested. Just enough human relationships to make it real, but not too much to make it soapy.
• The Walking Dead - I was expecting a bit more from a zombie series. Apparently it is based on a comic book strip and someone told me it pretty much follows the story there. Well, it doesn't have to! [hint! hint!]
• Haven - the first season of this supernatural "loosely" based on a Stephen King short story ended in an unexpected twist (which was to be expected). Am I waiting impatiently for the second season? Not really.
• Rubicon - show was cancelled. I can't remember anything remotely interesting about it.
• Royal Pains - doctors. That about says it all. This particular brand still has three unwatched episodes waiting for when both me and the wife want to watch it. It doesn't seem likely to happen soon.
• Lost Girl - waiting for the second season. Does not require brain. Still sexy. Canadian.
• Nikita - inertia. That's the only reason I keep watching. I have big mass, you see.
• A Game of Thrones - oh yes! Finally something I want to talk about. Hasn't started yet, but I've read the books and they are great. A feudal fantasy world that is focused on the political machinations in the Seven Kingdoms, with a little magic thrown in to spice things up, but kept nicely in the background. I can hardly wait! It is set to start on the 17th of April
• No Ordinary Family - about a superhero family, I have not really followed the show and meanwhile it was cancelled. bye bye!
• Better with You - it started as a funny show to watch with the girls. It seemed as a humorous comparison of the different stages of marriage. But it became the usual background laughter at people's blatant stupidity thing and I am not enjoying it anymore.
• Shattered - interesting concept, bad execution. Cancelled.
• Falling Skies - a replacement for V? Aliens attack again and a resistance is formed. Set to start in June.
• The Cape - Batman's poor little brother is trying his luck in a city that looks more like Robocop's Detroit than Gotham. Show was lame and has been cancelled, too.
• Outcasts - oh, the humanity! A show with so much promise and so little in the way of proper execution. The premise is that humans fucked up the Earth and in a last ditch effort sent a few colony ships towards a distant planet they named Carpathia. I expected something akin to Sid Meyer's Alpha Centauri (yes, old enough to have played that, too!), but in the end it became the quasi mystical "planetary alien entity" thing, mixed with really bad acting and inconsistent scripting. So it got cancelled. It was British, it was cheap, it has potential. They still screwed it up.
• Endgame - I am yet to find the time to watch the pilot of this show. Apparently, it is a Canadian show about a chess player that uses his skills to... you guessed it, solve crimes! If it is anything like Numb3rs, I'll watch the hell out of it. Something tells me it won't be quite like that, though.
• Southpark - still funny as hell and I continue watching it

There are the usual anime shows, too, but I won't list them. The blog entry has gotten long enough.

A while ago I was reporting the release of theStart's latest album, Ciao Baby, and the disappointing direction of their singing. I've revisited them and noticed that Aimee Echo, Jamie Miller and Chelsea Davis started a new band called Normandie which sounds very much like the old theStart, at least from the songs they've published on their MySpace site. Here is a clip from YouTube as well:

I said to myself "I'll just read a few passages of the book, just to relax a little, as I have a lot to do". Yeah right! I've started reading and I didn't stop until it was done. Stonewielder is a classic Malazan Empire book, but also bearing Esslemont's personal touch. There is the catastrophic magic battling immense godly power, while the ordinary soldier (the book focuses on heavies) carries on lead by the tragic commander, there are the weird twists from a perspective to another, the switches from a storyline to another, typical of a Malazan book, but also a bit less epicness and a lot more human failing, more characteristic to Esslemont than to Steven Erikson.

I have to say that I find the title to be a little off. The part of Greymane is quite insignificant until close to the end. A great book, nevertheless, and a nice prelude to The Crippled God, the tenth book (and laaast! :( ) in Steven Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen series, that I intend to read as soon as possible.

Don't you hate haters? Never mind that. This kind of question is similar in logic to the CrashIE site that I've just visited (and of the malignant piece of code there - do not open the site with Internet Explorer). Basically, CrashIE is a hater site for Internet Explorer that crashes said browser or at least makes it enter a heavy CPU load cycle. The "solution", they say, is to use better browsers, and you get a nice selection of Opera and Safari and, just to be politically correct, a FireFox icon at the bottom of the page, in between the two other sites that the guy did.

Haters always lose in the end, and this Stanley Shilov will be no exception. No wonder that on his blog he is discussing using Java and Firefox on Ubuntu systems. His extensive experience with Internet Explorer is the thing that probably made him find the hidden bug that a browser will crash if you put it in an infinite loop.

How much of an asshole can you be in order to make a site that will crash some random's guy browser in order to advertise your stupid spellchecker site? BTW, I am writing this in Google Chrome, making said site useless, since it spell checks automatically in any textarea element. Is that the reason what there is no Google Chrome icon on CrashIE?

Bottom line is that you suck ass, Stanley! When I was happy using IE3.0 you weren't even born. I hate you! ;) And, BTW, this is NOT the kind of site that the CodeProject newsletter should have linked to. I am very disappointed in you, guys!

You have to excuse me, I've found this blog that I like, Ars Technica, and I can't seem to stop linking to stories there. This one is just funny: UbiSoft released their newest Assassin Creed game and, in a deluxe version, they included a bunch of extras, including the complete soundtrack for the game. However, when looking closer to the ID3 tags for the songs, it was discovered they were pirated versions, distributed on torrents after being taken from the collector's edition of the game.


There is a "theory" that piracy is enhanced by the fact that it is so easy to use pirated content and so damn annoying using the official, paid, version. So easy, it appears, that UbiSoft people found it more efficient to download the pirated version than to go through inner channels to get the songs. They essentially pirated themselves! If that doesn't make you smile a little, you must not be a geek :)

Just a month ago, overwhelmed by a number unbelievable claims from companies and lawyers at that time, I wrote the blog entry titled Ridiculous self importance, relaying what I thought of those claims. And yet now I am forced to write another one. See what happens when people don't read my blog? :)

Let's start with the already blogged move by Red-Gate to unilaterally rescind a promise they took to keep Reflector free. Just follow the link to the story for details, but keep in mind the general idea: a software company makes a promise that is completely ignored later on.

Moving on to EA Games. Like any commercial company that reaches a certain critical size, they become assholes. I am talking about the game Dragon Age II, a game that EA Games promised in the forums it would not feature SecuROM, but it does (read article here)! The company also completely fails to notify the game buyers that the feature is there. Another article then tells us the story of a player that bad mouthed the company and got banned from the company forums for 72 hours. But during that time, the Dragon Age II game he bought could not be played, either. That really sounds a bit 1984, doesn't it? The screen device watches what you say and then punishes you. Welcome to the future!

The last article (one can only hope) in the asshole saga is about Twitter. This service that I could never find a use for has grown exponentially because of two factors: the social paradigm and the API that allowed people to make their own software on top of Twitter. Having reached the critical size, Twitter now publicly announced that it doesn't need third party applications anymore. "Thank you, guys, but we will be making the money from now on. Thanks again!". This is one of the reasons why I distrust the cloud idea. I give enough control to Google deciding what is relevant for my queries (and hosting this blog :) ) to give it or other cloud providers the physical ownership of my business.

I believe these stories are related to the recent efforts to regulate the Internet and not only that, but also how you will be permitted to use your own computer or mobile device. Just like weird events before World Wars, they are only the predictors of an era in which the web will be increasingly controlled and will become just another commercial platform for companies. These events that look morally and logically absurd are attempts to shift the regulatory framework in a direction or the other, while we remain blissfully ignorant of the battle over our heads.

Hmm, mentioning 1984 and predicting World Wars... am I becoming paranoid? Well, I hope so, because the alternative is that I am right.

Don't worry, it's ok now, my years old computer that I can't get myself to replace. The experience has been very educational and I want to share it with you. Here is what happened: the computer that I keep always on started making strange clanking sounds; they came from the HDD. I got a little concerned, but I didn't have the time to address the problem right then. The computer seemed to work fine so I continued (btw, don't you do that in the same situation :) ) to work on it. Finally the computer reset itself and it wouldn't boot. Or, better said, it would boot for a second and restart. I checked the hard drive cables, I removed and cleaned the processor cooler, I vacuumed the power source. Nothing worked. I took the IDE drive from an older Duron computer and tried to boot with that one. It didn't work either, but then again, I had no guarantee that the old drive was functional.

I was really upset. I had an exam to take, all my data was lost, I had a full schedule for days and, being the end of the month, not enough cash to buy a computer right away. And I needed bank loan formalities like I needed an anal probe. But, I thought, maybe I can take the hard drive at work and copy the data, or at least part of it. And it worked. In fact, the drive worked so well at work that I began to doubt that the HDD had any problems. What could it be? I did have a feeling that it might be from the processor cooler that I had removed to clean. After years of use, the thermoconducting gel that transferred heat from the CPU to the metal radiator was only a dusty crust. I decided to buy a cooler or at least some gel.

Of course, any computer shop that was near my work did not have coolers for my old Athlon processor, so I bought gel and then (to be sure) also a cooler for a more recent processor type. I went home, saw that the radiator was way too large for the processor so I removed the fan from the new cooler and placed it (using ingeniously twisted wires) on the old radiator, then applied it with new gel on the processor. And the computer began to work with no drives attached to it. However, attaching the drive would make it reset itself again.

The culprit was, I assumed, either the motherboard (oh no!) or the power source. I removed the old power source from the Duron computer and replaced it on the Athlon computer. And it worked! With wires and thermoconducting gel I brought my baby back to life. I was better than MacGyver! However, the new source would make a really high pitch sound when I turned the computer off and a loud fan noise when I turned it on. I had no intention of buying a new power source for an old computer, I just wanted to make it work.

So I went to my office and borrowed three power sources that had been replaced with newer models. Went back home... none of them worked. As computer parts go, the power source is both the most solicited and the less standard item. There are unlimited ways a power source can fail and the effects on the computer are always surprising. All three displayed some (different) sort of partial functionality. I was considering opening them up and making a Frankensteinian source from them. I know nothing of electronics, but how hard can it be (vision: me burned to a crisp by an electrical fire after having my heart stop due to electric shock). However, I did remember that the source in the Athlon computer was not the original source. I had replaced it with a newer model a while ago and I had kept the old one. I rummaged through my stuff and found the old power source. It worked, it had a somewhat loud fan, but not that loud and it didn't make any electrical high pitched noises. Saved!

I was congratulating myself on repairing the computer using only the things in my house (all but the new cooler) when I remembered that I had an old 500Gb external drive that wouldn't work unless you applied power from the computer power source to the internal drive in the box. And so I did that (using wires again, because the adapter from the old power port to the new got lost somewhere) and backed up all the data from the drive that I thought died. Now I have a backup!

And if I am here, why not borrow a voltmeter and try to figure out how to wire up this external drive so I can use it without all the wires sticking out of it? So the story continues, as this is what I intend to do. I am a guy, tinkering is in my DNA, and it is so satisfying. Also, it helps seeing the uncomprehending look on my wife's face and the horror in her eyes when she sees more wires. It's fun! :)