I can't make this shit up.

In another thread, responding to something I'd said about WiFi, brokensymmetry suggested it would be made criminal.

I refrained from a predictable followup in my sometimes anti-american way, thinking that, well, it's not exactly a sure thing.
I was wrong, it seems.

doctor destructo

In the last few weeks, I have experienced the following hardware damage:

• Main server (Gonzo) has developed some untraceable hardware fault that causes it to stop dead if I try doing a big network write to it. Given that it's my main fileserver, this is more than a little irritating. Having replaced damn near everything with spares to test, I am left with the conclusion that it's either the motherboard or the processor.
• Wireless server (Blimp) has developed a flaky hard drive. Given that it was built from flaky parts in the first place, this is hardly surprising.
• Junked work machine has become even more junked when, in attempting to extract the CMOS chip to try replacing the solder-on battery, I removed two legs (the ones holding the battery) right at the casing.
• The DDR-only Athlon board and chip that Ralph gave me some weeks ago is in some unspecified way dead. I find this out after purchasing a CPU fan, power supply, and DDR memory for it. This is the only DDR board I have, and the only ATX PSU board I own, so I can't use the bits for anything else just now.
• My cow orker gave me a pair of boards to try and swap into Gonzo. Neither of them recognises the 256MB SDRAM DIMM as anything bigger than 64MB, and both are EOL as far as BIOS upgrades go.
• And finally, to top things off nicely, I doused my own laptop (thankfully not the work one) with hot lemon-and-sucrose drink last night. It's dead. Completely. Not even a flicker when I hit the power. It's still under warranty, which I am going to attempt to invoke, and it's only been doing SETI scans and acting as a testbed Red Hat 8 box for the last month or so, but really, I'm quite pissed at this.

I also dropped my palmpilot off the desk, but it survived, so at least that's okay.