Maniac arrived..
I had moved a table into place, displacing a large amount of junk, hopefully temporarily. We situated the hardware, hooked up the various boxes, and LAN
hub. He had brought his
UPS, although I doubt it has served any practical purpose, It gave a chance to
show off new
hardware. I moved my
machine, we still tried to find John. No luck (so far).
NIC installed, plugged in, and after briefly
tweaking with
Windows a bit, the bits began to flow.
Ring!!
John's coming, just got off work. Returning home. It has begun to
rain.
Hard. We then realize we have quite a problem. The boxes have been moved into a central
room, but now can't reach the
phone jack wired into the data line.
No Problem! We'll just couple two lines together and stretch into the other room. Hmm.. not long enough. Call John, tell him to bring the longest cable he has. (he
forgets).
We carry John's
computer in from the pouring rain very
quickly.
Shuttle it downstairs. And so the jungle of
cables grows, gonna be hard to untangle in the morning, but don't worry about that now. Hook, twist, adjust, plug, we work like dedicated drones. We made a deal with my brother, he will join, and provide an extra phone cord.
Disaster you always remember in slow motion. "Slide that
UPS back some so I can move my
tower under the table some more..". I comply.. then..
clicks..
sparks... I can hear the power supply clicking on and off.. The
alarm on the UPS sounds... "Weeep! Weep! Wep!".. I have the quickness of mind to nab the cord from my box.. try to shut off my surge protector.. but sparks are coming from it.. "Don't get electrocuted!" I think. Power finally is shut off.
Smoke rises under the table.. "What happened?!?"
Smell of
burnt plastic..
The
aftermath leaves us puzzled, but we still pickup the pieces.
Everything is ok,
almost.. John's computer won't turn on.. It suffered the brunt of the incident.. still not sure why it happened. We HOPE it's just the power supply. John's
pissed as hell. "We'll, just
fuck me up the ass with a chainsaw", he comments. Huh.. we'll now we're down a computer.. with all its Athlon ass- kicking video card glory. Have an old crappy laptop, hook that up. Total count, three middle aged systems, one old as heck laptop.
Lessons learned from this:
-
Don't daisy chain together multiple power strips to one UPS, and power four full systems off it.
-
Don't plug this one UPS into an outlet with wiring exposed
Situation normalized..
Just the power supply went.. we hope...
On the plus side, the phone problem was resolved.. Have daisy chained the line through the following devices, in this order (from jack).
-
Coupling
-
Caller ID box
-
An old, burned out modem
-
Surge protector
-
UPS
Then proxied out to the network. "What pisses me off," observes
Maniac, "is that I'm getting way better baud then at home."
Oh, apparently we lost a
network card too,
mine, in fact. Odd it would nail
just that device, and Just mine. But hey, we had a spare, and they only cost $20, so no big crisis.
Around 11 pm, we finally get a game of Starcraft going. Yay! John's still pissed..
Still going, as I write this...