Oops! I stop paying attention for a few minutes, and Fred actually starts posting comics on time! I should do the same with rants.
In a recent storm, we went through a pair of power outages, and somewhere in there, my desktop motherboard fried. At least, I assume that it was the motherboard, because when I turn on the desktop now, the fans start running, the hard drive starts spinning, and then... nothing happens. There's no confirmation beep, there are no distress beeps, there's just some whirring and a message from my monitor that no signal is being received.
As a note, my desktop dying means that I can't access my MegaTokyo e-mail box. I apologize to anyone who hasn't received a reply from me in the last week due to this inconvenience.
The part about my desktop death that I find funny is that this follows a pattern that has gone on for years now. Every few years, I buy either a new desktop or a new laptop as my primary machine - and, like clockwork, my old box dies within 3 months of the new arrival. After I bought my Alienware back in early 2004, my desktop died horribly without warning, so I moved onto the Alienware full-time. A year and a half later, I got around to rebuilding the desktop, at which point the Alienware collapsed under its own horrible heat problems, so I gutted it. Then, a few months ago, I bought a Dell XPS so I could game on the road, and now my desktop is fried.
It's a vicious yet amusing cycle, and I theorize that it's a passive-aggressive thing my computers do in protest of the newer, sexier boxes I bring home. My machines prefer death to second citizen status, and commit suicide when I don't spend much time with them as a way of telling me that I'll be sorry when they're gone.
Ah, but this time, I'm ready for the next death in the cycle, because my XPS is on warranty for 3 years - I will have two computers at once, dammit!