zotmeister | Smoke

My laptop just bit the wax tadpole, smoke and all. I'm guessing the hard drive is fine, but I have visually confirmed that the heat sink has a sizable black spot, complete with some piece of the motherboard melted to its underside. The processor itself looks fine, but the charring about an inch away stands testament to why this laptop no longer powers up and likely never will. I'll call WidowPC about it as soon as I locate my order number. I hope I have a copy of it on my external hard drive; if not, I'll have to find a way to get my emails off the hard drive inside the corpse (something I pretty much want to do anyway). Needless to say, this is a severe disruption of my communication network. Any emails I've recently received are trapped on a hard drive I can't read due to the computer it is connected to being burnt. Any emails sent to me now I can check on the web, although I don't like to do that; I like to keep records, especially of my replies, so any response you may get will likely be terse. To those of you waiting on physical items: I've temporarily lost your address. In my experience, late December is a bad time to try to rush a delivery, so I may not be able to make good on my offerings until January. My apologies, but it truly is circumstances beyond my control. If it's any consolation, I've also been waiting on a delivery myself - from Japan; I placed the order a month ago, but it still hasn't shipped yet. I wrote an email complaining, but I wasn't able to send it here from work. It's sitting on my hard drive... As if I wasn't busy enough already. At work, I'm learning as much about a new task as I can before the person who presently performs it leaves his job in less than a week. Just when it seemed like my luck was improving. - ZM