Back online! I'm whole again...

It's kind of stupid to say that since I had access from work. But the internet has been part of my daily life for over 10 years now, and it's something that I take for granted. So when I simply can't get to it, it's painful. Add to that the fact that I couldn't play the MMORPG Eve-Online, and you start to understand the extent of my devastation. I'm kind of pushing it am I? But you get my point!

Having said that, I took the better of this evening uploading our pictures from our trip to Italy this past June on my new flickr pro account. It's an amazing site/web application and once you've started using it, it's addictive. A prime example of the web 2.0 and what's in store over the next few years. So far I have about 550 pics up and I still have a few days left to add. You can see the latest pics added on the right in the "my flickr pics" applet.

I also spent the morning adding all my bookmarks to my BlinkList. I had started doing so last week with del.icio.us but found BlinkList had better features and a more practicle interface. It's still in beta but works fairly well. I strongly suggest you give it a try!

Off to bed now, have a good night!

P.S.: Oh, in case you were wondering, it was my mobo! The Prescott P4 I had installed fried my P4C800 Deluxe and it had to be replaced. A bummer, but a cheaper fix then replacing the processor. Oh, well!


[EVE Online] [flickr] [BlinkList]

No home access to the web since Sunday!

On Sunday, my home life as I knew it ended. My PC died or something and I lost my access to the net , the web, to the world as I knew it!! And I survived...

Sort of. Thank god for work or else I would be able to post this at all. My PC problem is something I had yet seen and still haven't resolved 4 days later. I mean, I've had to replace a faulty graphics card or a dead HDD, but I had yet to encounter the melodramatic voice message that came out of my speakers when I booted my PC that morning: "System failed CPU test". Repeated over and over. Actually I never figured it out until I asked my better half what she heard and pointed to the ASUS manual to that sentence above.

So I did the only thing I could think of: pull out the CPU, a nice little P4 2.6G a bit over a year old. Every looked normal; neither the CPU nor the heatsink were hot or anything. Cleaned the dust off and around the casing and put everything back in and booted up again. It powered up normally, or so I thought. That Sunday we had planned to work outside, get ready for winter and plant some tulips for next spring. So I shot it off and told myself I was lucky.

Boy was I wrong.

Monday morning, I get up, put on my PJs, walk into the office/PC room, boot it and go down for OJ. When I came back up the monitor was dead (led blinking) and only the fans were humming along. I rebooted the PC and that message of agony was back: "System failed CPU test"!!!!! Ahhh man!!!

Shut it off and go to work was the only thing I could do.

Once at work, I looked up some online forums and asked around the office. The diagnostic was the same: nasty problem which could be a bunch of things (CPU, PSU, video card, RAM, etc).

So here we are, Wednesday, and still no access to the net from home. No email, no web, no gaming, no MMORPG, no EVE Online! And to add insult to injury, my skill training in EVE Online finished over the week-end, and now I'm not training anything and loosing all these days!!

Tonight I'll be doing a few things I've told I can test, and if that fails then I'll bring the PC to Microbytes for them to fix. Which means no PC for the week-end either!!!