joy and sorrow

Taking a brief step out of the current thread of thinking and discussion
-- Happy Valentine's Day! --

However, on a sad note I must admit that my home computer has given up the ghost. It was the first computer that I ever built from scratch, but now it is relegated to spare parts. It appears that when my monitor went a couple of months ago, it was a precursor of things to come. The power supply failed late last week, causing a hard crash while I was listening to some music. That power failure (and probably my subsequent diagnostics) seems to have dragged the whole ship down with it. Currently the hard drive appears to be non-functional, which is somewhat painful as there was some data loss (but not completely catastrophic). However, on top of those 2 critical components (power and storage), the power supply appears to have taken out the motherboard and possibly even the processor. To put all that in non-technical-speak, I'll compare it to biology -- my computer suffered a massive heart failure, which was further complicated by permanent brain damage, pulmonary failure, and extensive nerve damage.

Oh well... the future of my home computing experience awaits, I just need to figure out which way to head. ;)