It has been a few minutes since my last journal entry. Perhaps time for another.
The other day, I was playing Wolfenstein (The New Order, fun) when suddenly my computer died. And I mean DIED. I've never seen this happen before. It just flicked off and went silent, nothing functioning at all, except my UPS which was screaming in agony. After a bunch of random flipping of switches and plugging of plugs, I discovered that my UPS was fine, which is bad news, because it means my power supply was dead.
For the first time in my life, I figured it was best to have a professional check this out - I knew I could buy a replacement power supply and I knew I could install it (I built my previous computer), but since I wasn't computery enough to be
sure the power supply was the problem, I might've wasted a few hundred bucks and a couple days of computer usage waiting for it to arrive.
So I headed down to the local computer repair shop, and the guy there took my computer, and collected some information from me. When he got to my email address, which I always spell out because there's no point in trying to say it, he said, "H-A-M... Hamumu? Like the software company?" I was shocked. This was a new experience. Well, he quickly explained how he had heard of me - it turns out he went to school with someone else famous, someone you may have heard of who goes by the name of
SpaceManiac! He said SpaceManiac had given him all my demos, but made sure not to give him the full versions, so thumbs up on that. Plus,
he said he felt like he was meeting a celebrity, so that makes me one. And I was wearing my "Robot Got Kitty!" shirt too.
So okay, maybe I'm not actually a celebrity, but it sure felt funny to walk in somewhere and be 'recognized'. If not a measure of my immense popularity, at least it was a nice demonstration of epic coincidence. Yelp returned about 5 computer shops within a few miles of me, and I picked the one where SpaceManiac's buddy worked.
Dramatic epilogue: they fixed my computer in a few hours, and as a bonus it was a lot cheaper than if I had fixed, because it turns out I didn't need anywhere near as powerful of a power supply as I had. So I got a much weaker one, which clearly is still running all my stuff just fine (and quieter too), for about a third of the price. All in all, a successful adventure.
