Sandy's Blog

This post, coming to you from a sub 300Mhz laptop w/ 800×600 screen and firefox 0.93. Yes, i have destroyed my computer More about that later.

So, what have I been up to? I was racing at Innerleithen on the 20th which was really really good fun. The race was organised by Edinburgh Road Club (which I have recently become a member of), and was a cross country race with a twist. Basically they had two timing stations, one at the lowest point of the course and one at the highest, and one of the prizes was ‘King of the downhill’ - who can get from top to bottom fastest - which attracted a fair few downhillers, it was nice as they are always good craic. I ended up finishing 21st after a flukey and very unlucky pinch punchure (on pumped up 2.25″ cinders!) during the last downhill adding at least 10 minutes to my time, if I hadn’t punchured I think I would have finished roughly 10-12th which would have been good considering I hadn’t had a day off the bike for 7 days prior to the race. It was a real laugh though and I spoke to some people I hadn’t seen in ages, so wasn’t particularly bothered about doing bad as it had been such a great day.

Last weekend I went out for a monster ride with the Edinburgh University Cycling Club. We met up at the Commonwealth Pool car park in Edinburgh at 7am on Sunday morning (yes, I got up at 6:15am!), chucked all the bikes in the van and drove up to Pitlochry. After the obligitary road trip requirement of getting lost on the way, we arrived and set off around 10-10:30am. Make no mistake, most of these guys are pretty hardcore and are very very fast. Everyone (including me) beasted it at the start because it was so cold, but it was such a nice day too! The route was a figure of 8, with Pitlochry in the middle. The first loop was shorter, maybe 6 miles or so but had great singletrack - some of the best of the day actually.

There were so many weird and wonderful paths and tracks that we went on, im so glad that I brought along the GPS so I can retrace the route in the future. After 3-4 hours I realised I had made a slight schoolboy error, I had only packed enough food and water to go out for that amount of time so had to grit my teeth till the end, I really wanted to do more of the great singletrack, but my body started packing in after about 6 hours in the cold - I (along with about half the group) was suffering some form of cramp due to dehydration. By the end of the ride I was entirely soaked through, couldn’t feel my feet - or recognise my bike. I was absolutely exhausted and wanted to sleep, however there was a 2 hour car journey back down to Edinburgh to sweat through so we stopped at the Perthshire Vistor Centre, where we had dinner and a go at whiskey tasting! After another dinner when I got home, got an early night. The banter on this ride was immeasurable, we discussed most issues, from MrT to Wife-Beating which was such a laugh.

So, my computer. Well to be perfectly honest, when I decided to take the step to water cool my PC, I acknowleged it was a risk and that I had to be prepared to lose everything - similar to investing in equities. In short my CPU is fried, and my motherboard is as well, I think. To clear a few things up this mess was due to me being a bit special and fiddling with fittings, not due to any problem or defect with the actual watercooling system. Monday night, after work - while helping sister with maths, cooking dinner, making inane conversation with a neighbour and dealing with a phone call, I noticed the watercooling system was not flowing properly. Call me insane, call me special, but my brain said ‘investigating why your watercooling system is not working’ is not a priority right now.

The computer had been on all day, and I assumed that the flow had been off all day. wrong.
If something was really wrong, the temperature fail-safe auto power off thing would kick in. wrong again.

Basically, when I was doing the 4 other things I went into my bedroom and must have knocked the fittings (which i had been fiddling with for no reason the previous day, and probably didn’t reattach entirely correctly). This caused the circulation of water to stop, and therefore stopped the dissapation of heat. After I had successfully multi-tasked all the other (more important) real life stuff, I went through to my bedroom and all I could smell was burning silicon - Doh