Slonik’s Neighborhood

...of course, with the working from home lately, it makes little difference to me.  However, our sole remaining high-schooler is pretty happy to have a day dedicated to Gaia Online, pizza, and The Office (American version).

File under "I Am Not Making This Up" ...

Available now at your local comestibles emporium.
(Invitation only. Black tie.)

ATTENTION TEENAGERS: this is what happens when you go off to college.

Like a half-digested fountain... when she comes.

Yep, it's even got Horny Goat Weed.
 
Never mind what I'm doing using a camera phone in the men's room (again).  You got your business, I got mine.

M. Ward: LOATHE him.
No links, no apologies. Dude's microphone license needs to be revoked, RIGHT NOW.
 
However...

 

The Dead Weather: LOVE them.

 

 

Pay attention, class; this is Rock School.

Spot, our cranky old lady cat (foreground), still can't stand that Rikki exists (that's our young boisterous boy in the background).  But I did not pose this shot; I wouldn't even care to try it.  And they're upstairs right now, just hanging out together on the comforter, looking for all the world like they do this kind of thing every day*.
 
 
*just to be clear: they really, really don't

MORAL OF THE STORY: Never mow the lawn.

The problem is... er, was, dammit... a secondary yet critical chip, which is normally TWO separate chips.  For this particular model, though, the chipmaker (nVidia) decided it would be more economical to combine both the North Bridge and the South Bridge chips into one.  This consolidation was a nifty piece of engineering in some ways.  On the other hand, it creates a bottleneck, a single point of failure, where there's simply too much going on.
 
Imagine your city builds pair of train stations within a block of each other, to split the heavy daily traffic they anticipate into zones.  Station N serves All Points North, while Station S sends folks South.  It works and things are fine for a while.  Years later, though, the city hits hard times, and they close Station S, routing all traffic through N instead.  If Station N was originally designed with enough tracks, and was laid out cleverly enough, then maybe it could handle the extra load with minimal reworking of the timetables.
 
And this combined "Station N" chip on my mainboard? ...well, it couldn't.  Here's why:

That's it, in the yellow circle, under that little block which says "ASUS" (sorry about the photo quality; can't be helped now).  That's aluminum, not copper, with only one skinny heatpipe leading up to an array of fins between the I/O ports and the CPU socket.  Note its left-right alignment; see how it's right next to and under the level of that long blue slot?...

Follow that copper pipe down to where it vanishes:  That's where the video card sits, covering the "Station N" chip (Northbridge + Southbridge) completely.  No room to spare.  All snug and tucked in, right?
 
Problem is, all the additional electrical traffic made the combo chip run hot.  Way too hot.  That copper pipe, which is supposed to lead the heat away from the chip to be dissipated by the fins in the upper left, is completely inadequate to the task.  It's like trying to air-condition your whole train station with your old dorm-room fan.  And since there's so little room in there, once the video card is set up properly, there's no way to add additional heatsinks, a water-cooling block, or anything else, to improve cooling.  And the video card is REQUIRED; there's no way to use the mainboard without one.  Even if a plain-vanilla onboard chip would have been good enough for this computer, there isn't one available.
 
So it basically slow-cooked itself to death.  And now I need to figure out how to get all the data off my two harddrives, which are perfectly operational, except that they require a different chip on my now-irreparable mainboard to function (I chose hardware-based RAID 0, or "striping").
 
If that combination Northbridge/Southbridge chip had only been positioned out of the way of the video card, I could've modded the system to cool it better.  If only.  aaaaaaaaaaargh

So I've been browsing through NetFlix instant-watch for 30 minutes solid, and I'm no closer to finding "Year of Living About 14 Minutes Ago Dangerously".  Maybe I should check the regular DVDs?
 
Screw it, I'm bumping Johnny Dangerously to the top of the queue.  Michael Keaton vs. Joe Piscopo!  What more do you want?