This morning I awoke to the sound of a ringing phone. My boss was on the other line. He informed me that the office file server wasn’t responding, and that it was making a loud clicking noise. I jumped in the shower and hurried to work, worried about what I’d find.

Luckily, the problem wasn’t so bad. A hard drive had failed, but it was part of a RAID-5 array and was under warranty, so there was no data loss and a replacement is on the way. Heat was probably the culprit, so I also ordered some round IDE cables to improve the airflow in the case, which already has plenty of fans.

Later, Lillis called me to let me know that she had observed something interesting this morning. While playing with Qubit near my desk, she watched as my computer’s power supply emitted angry sparks and died in a puff of foul-smelling electrical smoke. That’s the second time that’s happened to me in less than a year, and with completely different hardware in different houses and with different surge protectors.

So now my computer is dead until I buy a new power supply. Hopefully none of the other hardware was damaged, but I won’t know until I turn it on.