The Misadventures of Dan
Peer into the mind of Dan as he tries to build an MP3 Player for his PDA and searches for the next thing in his life be it an electrical engineering job or graduate school.
Saturday, April 24, 2004
.:7:51:24 PM:.
And we're back... sort of.
A windstorm reached full force at about 7:30 pm. So much so that it (apparently) toppled one of the power poles down causing a blackout in certain north eastern areas of St. Albert. My block was hit and we had no power for two hours. When the power came back my mom and dad heard a loud crack/pop and then the computer died.
So, I came home from fellowshipp finding the computer completely dead. Nothing working. (I didn't hear about the noise my computer made until later today). I opened up the tower and was praying/hoping that it was just the power supply and not the actual motherboard... please! We checked the fuse with the multimeter (just because, I know fuses don't blow... normally). Still good (d'oh!). My dad and I poured over the power supply hoping to find something. By accident we shook it a little and we heard a rattle (ooh)... loose part? maybe!? Hidden in a forest of capacitors there was a navy blue plastic sheafing... very similar to the other ones... in fact EXACTLY the same as the other except for one thing... it was torn. That's right, a capacitor blew up.
Slightly elated and yet cautious we went to go hunt down a power supply I was extremely showcked to find out that the first store we went to sold it at $99. Ninety-Nine dollars!?!! I'm certain I built one in a lab for much cheaper but I wasn't about to do that. After a bit more searching we found one for $39.99. Perhaps we could have gotten one for even cheaper but I wanted to know if it really was the power supply before going on :)
Conclusions.
It's still slightly puzzling because I don't understand HOW the capacitor exploded. When the black out occured the computer is 'off'. I know that the computer remains OFF when the power returns because that's what happened before. If that's true then there shouldn't have been any power in the system at all so how did the capacitor charge up? Perhaps I should tape an 'X' to my window and see if I get a response :P
.:1:06:56 AM:.
My Computer WON'T START!!!
I came home from fellowship to suddenly find my computer powered down. I push the power button and nothing happened. I checked the power cable and tried it again, nothing... umm... what's going on?
Sunday, April 18, 2004
.:7:10:50 PM:.
New Free webstat counter
I'm very happy with Dataplain, I've been using them for over a year now to monitor the stats on this blog and Net Ninja. Today, I came across a brand new free tracker called StatCounter. So far, it's pretty cool it has blocking cookies and allows you to block IPs (from being counted).
It beats out Dataplain in terms of letting you see individual visitors and their geographic locations (you have to pay to get Dataplain to do that). In my opinion, both Dataplain and StatCounter are slightly better than Site Meter because the interface and the breakdown is a bit clearer. But again, they measure different things. StatCounter does not show you the duration of the visit like Site Meter. Neither StatCounter nor Site Meter have as nice summaries (yearly, monthly, weekly, daily, etc.) as Dataplain. So it's pretty much up to you what kind of information you want.
