Turns out, this next week will be my last week that I have to go to Oklahoma (barring emergencies, of course, but that’s always the case).

Needless to say, the wife was most pleased.  As, of course, am I.

But I must say, I will miss the restaurants, and the travelling itself wasn’t irritating.  It was the being away from my family for 6 days that was irritating, but the travel itself wasn’t too bad.

In other news, the heatsink retaining bracket on my home computer had the catches that the heatsink latched onto break off on the one side.  I found this out this morning, when my computer booted, then promptly shut itself down (to protect the processor from damage through overheating), and wouldn’t start up again.  Opening up the box, I discover the problem.  Great.  Now I have to go get thermal compound and find a bracket somewhere.  It’s a Socket 754, too, which there weren’t all that many made, so finding one was a bitch.  None of the computer stores had it around here, but there’s a guy in town that I was sent to who had it.  If you can name a very, extremely esoteric and rare piece of computer equipment that you need, I’ll bet Howard has 5 of them, which he will sell to you for a very reasonable price.  $5 and my computer is back on track!

...and this is why I need to take some classes about computers.  When my computer does such things, I usually cry...then call some people and cry some more.  Eventually, I take the computer to the “Geek Squad” or call some other smart nerdy-type to come to my house where my wallet is anally taken advantage of.

You think after a class or two, I would know enough to save some tears and wallet-sexual-abuse?

Computer classes are fine for learning about the OS, about apps, the Internet technologies, and the like.  This problem was a hardware problem.  Let me be clear:

DO NOT MESS WITH YOUR COMPUTER’S HARDWARE UNLESS YOU REALLY, REALLY KNOW WHAT YOU’RE DOING!

I don’t say this to be an asshole, but I have literally decades of geek experience with computers.  I’ve assembled my own, from individual component parts.  If you mess with your hardware, there is the very real possibility of bricking (rendering useless, as a brick on a table) your gear.

Glad to have you in Oklahoma for a bit.