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I Was Fired. Literally! (But Not Like You Think)
by Aaron Smith on Thursday, November 15 2007In case you haven't noticed, the blog well runneth dry over the past month or so. The truth is, Raul getting hit by a car was probably the most exciting personal thing that has happened to any of us lately. Note how I said personal. On the GW front, there has been such a flurry of activity that I can hardly keep up with what I'm supposed to be doing. I want very badly to talk about the current Window-Eyes development process. There are so many cool things happening that are going to…well…I can't even say what they're going to do. But it's an amazing process to be part of, and I can't wait for the release of Window-Eyes 7. So that's my excuse; I've been neck deep in documentation, testing, and developing, not to mention support, in-house IT management, and so on. That's not a, "Oh, poor me," mind you – I love every minute of it. Well, almost every minute. But full days do make getting a blog entry out very difficult.
Raul has a decent excuse too. He's been working hard on making the Voice Sense as rock solid as all the other products we offer. The Voice Sense GPS/Navigation features are very cool. If you haven't heard his presentation, you're missing out. Needless to say, all his work with HIMS on the Voice Sense, along with support and all the other things he does, makes his blog entries few and far between.
Jeremy is full of excuses, the main one being that he's never around. I can't remember the last time he was in the office for an entire day. Travel seems to be Jeremy's life lately. And while he's building up a solid GW Micro presence wherever he goes, more time on the road means less time on the blog.
Now Doug and Mike are a different story. Doug had an excuse. He was moving from one side of the country to the other (almost). But now that he's settled, I'm not going to let him off easy. He has had at least three really good blog ideas, and not one of them has evolved into anything fun to read. Come on, Doug! I guess I can only be so hard on the guy who signs my paycheck, huh?
Mike? Well, Mike is Mike. Let's move on.
Oh, I'm just kidding. Mike is more of a talker than a writer, and his ideas float around verbally rather than taking literary form. It's just as well; he can go on and on sometimes.
So there are all our excuses, lame though they may be.
I suppose I do have one story I can share. Raul mentioned on the gw-info list about one of GW's employees who had a computer fire. I replied, pleading the fifth. But I've had enough queries to warrant an explanation, so to please the masses, here goes the tale.
Before our daughter arrived, I was an avid gamer. Not a die-hard gamer, but I certainly enjoyed my share of first person shooters, fragging 'til the sun came up. One evening, as I was blasting away some nasties (in Unreal Tournament, I believe), I picked up the faint smell of sizzling electronics. If you've ever been around resistors, capacitors, and such when they've gone south, you know the smell I'm talking about. It's a very metallic, acrid smell that instantly tells your brain something not good is happening. Either my game was so real I was smelling spent shell casings, or something was amiss. "But I can't be bothered with this," I said to myself. "I'm busy saving the world from blood thirsty aliens." But the smell became stronger, and I started to get a little worried. Burning electronics is not a smell that means everything is hunky-dorey. So I put my game on pause, and went to flip on a light so I could investigate the aroma. When I got over to the light switch, I happened to glance over at my server before turning the light on. At first, the sight didn't register with my brain. Flames? In a computer case? Nah, that can't be right. Then it hit me. Holy crap! There were flames in my computer case! I flipped the light on, and clamored over to my machine as fast as I could. Sure enough, a bright fireball was gleaming out at me. I managed to get a decent string of expletives out before yanking the power cord out of the back of the machine. As the fans in my case spun down, the glow subsided, and in its place sat four or five toasted power capacitors, all covered in an ash-y white powder. I sat there for a few minutes, stunned, pondering my situation, somewhat tempted to plug the power back in just to see what would happen. Fortunately, sanity prevailed; I disconnected my drives to preserve whatever data I could, pulled the cards out to see if there was more damage, then finally pulled off the motherboard so I could take a closer look.
I had seen burnt electronics in my day, but this line of exploded capacitors was impressive. I could tell where the airflow from the power fan was supplying a gracious host of oxygen to what I'm sure started out to be not much more than a warm spot. But that was enough fuel to bring it to life.
Disillusioned by the fact that my server was down, I went back to my other machine, told the aliens that their ass-kicking would have to wait, and fired up Google to see if I was unique, or if other people had the same issue with the same board. After quite a bit of time searching, I was about to give up, willing to except my misfortune as a fluke, when I stumbled across a hardware forum with some poor slob lamenting about his machine catching on fire. A little more reading, and sure enough, it was the same board that I had.
It was an ECS board, and he had contacted the manufacturer about the issue, only to be told that since the board was out of its 30-day warranty, there was nothing they could do. I was in the same situation, so I didn't bother pursuing it. If anything, I was just elated that I was home when it happened. I can freak myself out pretty easily imagining that fireball roasting away while I was somewhere else.
Along with not losing my house, I was fortunate enough to not lose any data. In fact, after poking around my logs, I'm pretty sure that machine was still serving away even while it was up in flames. Perhaps there's something to be said for that kind of commitment, although I can assure you, when I rebuilt that machine, I didn't use an ECS motherboard.
So that's my story. I still can't believe that thing caught on fire. In all my years, I've never seen electronics perform such a dazzling display of destruction.
We've all had our share of bone-headed, power related mistakes, anywhere from Doug frying a motherboard by working on it while the power was still plugged in to Ron frying a machine by plugging in the power when the supply switch was set to 220 volts rather than 110 (really, who looks at those things anyway?). But this one was completely out of my hands. That makes it a little harder to feel ok about. I can handle devastation if I know I'm the knucklehead who caused it. But when things blow up on their own, I get a little nervous.
