rest in pieces

damn, my site looks weird on Firefox/FreeBSD/Gnome.

very eventful day today. yesterday too. let’s jog my memory a bit.

i planned to visit Tiff at the PC Fair on saturday, wanting to go with her and all that, but i woke up late and was already messing around with my motherboard by the time i called her.

grabbed a few cookies for lunch, and took the LRT to pasar road. it was my first time there, and the stuff they sell there are quite interesting. there’s fish. fighting ones plus the assortment of fishy stuff. and electronics and hardware gadgets. a lot of stalls selling dubious items too.

identified the regular electronics shop eugene goes to, thanks to a few international smses and a call to merv. standwell. only mr. kwan, the boss there, knew what i really wanted. picked up 4 trimpots (trimming potentiometers. wanted 50kohm ones, when i checked only 1 of them is, while the rest was 100k). also got myself a multimeter, some fluxed solder and helping hands (and some electrical tape from the next store).

got home. whipped out my brother’s soldering iron that he got free from his realrobots subscription. here begins my droop mod adventure.

a droop mod is basically a modification done to a [motherboard] to stop it from losing voltage when the CPU is under load.

it involves putting a resistor at certain points to trick the voltage regulator into thinking that the voltage is too low.

i didn’t have a proper workplace, so i reserved some floor space near the balcony window. i’d have plenty of light and marble to rest the iron on, but a backache was inevitable.

first, i practiced the soldering bit with the legs of the trimpot, creating a messy yet workable piece of art. that was the easy part. i already noticed that the soldering iron wasn’t working so well, but i continued using it, to my folly.

by then, it was already 6. and i was supposed to have arrived at JL’s place for our trip to town. so i put everything down reluctantly and rushed off to Bangsar.

traffic was good, so we made it to Times Square in good time. JL plans to audition for the post of Sports Toto announcer, so we were there at level 13 to witness the draw results that day.

even royal ceremonies aren’t as serious as these. no handphone noises allowed. a lot of security guards. a lot of suitcases. everything mentioned once, is mentioned again as confirmation. everything is explicitly shown to the video camera as evidence.

i guess even random fate can be tampered with.

i always thought that the numbers were generated by computers, but they’re actually determined by a torrent of air in 7 distilling-bottle-looking thingies.

anyway, i forget the exact details. ask JL. 😛 watching balls floating around for an hour was rather tiring. i’d explain more actually, but i’m rather bushed at the moment too.

after that, we went over to Sg Wang to pick up my serviced PS2, and we had a normal filling dinner at Shokudo in low yat.

sunday arrives.

couldn’t sleep well, thinking about the stuff i need to do to the motherboard. woke up around 9, and tossed in bed for an hour or two. when i did get up, i went straight for the soldering iron.

despite some difficulty, i managed to get everything soldered right. at least it seemed so. now all i had to do was set the resistor to 28k, and all should be well. i wasn’t sure how to do this, so i tried smsing eug to no avail, and resorted to posting a newbie question on EOCF. at that point i had a lunch appointment, so i left it at that.

lunch. met up with Ash whom I got to know on friendster. there was an awkward exchange of SMSes earlier (sorry :P), so it was a good opportunity to get to know one another. we meet at uptown, ate at killeneys. she brought a friend, whose name was May i think, and we all had a good conversation on relationships.

one interesting point brought up was that men always portray themselves as having options (in choosing partners of the opposite sex for whatever). in reality, an ‘option’ would be picked up immediately if it was viable. but a single guy with options doesn’t really have any. sure, as a last resort, but thinking back the person wouldn’t have taken up any of them anyway.

i think i’m losing myself here. 😛 argh.

got home. whee, a reply on EOCF. i’m supposed to test the resistance of the multimeter BEFORE soldering it on. silly me. unsoldered one leg, accidentally ripped the other connection from the motherboard.

here’s when things went wrong.

the iron was totally off at this point. i couldn’t use the tip of it for anything, so i ended up improvising with the sides. due to my unpreparedness and lack of good posture, i managed to solder a few unrelated connections together, ripped off the original motherboard solder from some, unhooked one of those small components from its proper location and lost it somewhere.

that was basically the end of it. i daren’t turn the system on at this state. might’ve killed the rest of the components (which costs much more). time to cut my losses and buy a new one.

cleaned up. took a shower. took my sis and JL to merv’s shop where we all took the LRT together to the PC fair. ndb and naf came along too.

the KLCC convention centre where it was held was a nice place, despite being forced to go up and down 3 floors just to get to where we want. the 1st hall was where the big league companies were, with big booths and lotsa girls in nice tight clothes. didn’t spend much time there, as time was ticking, and tiff was waiting. 😀

the next few halls were more down to earth. since it was the last day, the place pretty much turned into a cyber-pasar malam, with every exhibitor shouting out last calls for their supposedly discounted goods.

went to the catcha booth where tiff was. tried our luck at the typing of the dead contest to no success. it was impossible to win in the defeated state of mind i was in. ended up with two copies of the same magazine. 😛 oh well, the winner supposedly invested a lot (a long subscription and a lot more copies of the same mag!), so i guess he deserved the adidas 1:1.

so much for my big talk. 😛

didn’t find any motherboards for sale, but i did manage to get one quote for a foxconn socket 478 motherboard. socket 478, the type i need, is slowly being phased out, so it’s going to be hard to find a motherboard that would make me happy. oh well, we’ll see what happens tomorrow (EL!).

after a quick round around the booths, we went to Chili’s for dinner. merv volunteered to wait, while the rest of us made a quick visit to Kino. kittenz got herself a volume of furuba, while i got myself the next Darren Shan trilogy. since i can’t use my computer, might as well read for a change.

by the time we were done with dinner, it was maybe 10.30. the LRT will probably be jam-packed, so we decided to walk back to Dang Wangi where our vehicles were. it was a nice cooling night, and the view was fantastic. attempted a stunt with the fountains between KLCC and Public Bank, getting myself refreshingly wet. oh well, we got caught in the rain after that anyway.

so here i am. showered. sighing as the wind blows through the apartment. break time.

since i’ll be off tomorrow (last minute approval from the boss :D), i’m hoping to take a break. but there’s the last minute coin-exchange (my mom found a bunch of duit raya packets full of gold coins), and possibly my mom’s epf withdrawal. might even consider dropping by low yat to get a replacement board.

*sigh* there’s just no rest for the technically-inclined, is there? :