Upgraded to the new version of Semagic - much better.
Something really cool happened to me a few days ago.
Every once in a while, something will happen or I'll come to some relatively insignificant revelation and I'll say something like "I should write something about that on live journal", but more often than not I either forget or cannot find the motivation to type up a post. Last week, something happened that was awesome enough to motivate me to post, though :).
Let me start from the beginning. Me and my friends have gotten back into playing some Starcraft (an awesome strategy game) on the LAN up here (brings back memories). Well, my CD is a bit old and run down, but I managed to find it and get Starcraft to work, anyways. Our friend Joe wanted to play, but didn't have the CD and we didn't want to wait to copy the disk or depend on some random cracks. So, I know the drill, run down and give him the CD to install and start up the game, then take it out of his drive and back upstairs to my room and use it to boot the game for myself. This way, we can both play in essance on only one CD. I give it to him, go back up for about 15 minutes, come back down for the CD and I'm greeted with "It's not working..." etc. etc. Not only that, but he tells me about the huge (and exceptionally deep) scratch on my CD that mysteriously appeared...great. Now, I'm not judging anyone. Maybe it was there before and I just didn't notice, even though it installed that very morning on my machine just fine. Either way, it doesn't really matter, so I just take it and don't worry about it. It's not too tough to find a good copy of starcraft around the internet, anyways.
I bring the CD back up with this huge scratch in it, assuming it's not going to run at all...but miraculously, autorun starts up and then the game even launches up without any problems. Anyways, I join the LAN game (Joey is standing behind me, as he never got the game to work but wanted to watch) and all of a sudden I hear this huge snap. At first I'm worried it came from my computer, because starcraft happened to freeze right afterward, but then Joey says "I think it was one of my guitar strings, I'll be right back". There I am thinking "Yes! Wasn't my computer!". Anyways, my whole computer seems frozen, and I have to restart. When the computer restarts, it still can't detect the CD in the drive....weird. So, I open the CD drive (without looking at it right away) to see what's up, and all of a sudden I hear *ding ding ding*, like little pieces of metal crumbling to the floor...
Turns out, the snap we heard *did* come from my computer. My CD drive specifically. The crack in the CD wasn't able to handle the stress from spinning at high RPM's, and finally exploded while still in my drive. There were literally hundreds of little pieces of CD, it was a huge explosion.....I kid you not. The first thing I did, of course, was grab my camera and start taking pictures of it :).
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So, I thought this was freaking awesome, I couldn't even be mad that almost for sure my drive was destroyed as this experience was far too cool. Anyways, so I unplug the drive and take it out...and I hear some suspicious dinging sounds inside, so I turn it upside down, and what do you know...
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All of these little pieces of CD started coming out. The picture doesn't do how much fell out of that drive justice, as I shook most of it out into a garbage can....hehe, ridiculous.
So, I decide to take the drive apart and see what happened to its innards. And what do you know, the explosion launched sharp pieces of CD literally everywhere in the drive. All over the circuit board, the metal shielding, in between the gears, literally everywhere I was finding little green pieces of that starcraft CD. This is a picture, completely untampered with, of the drive right after I got the lid off it:
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I spent about an hour picking little pieces of CD bits out of the drive, against the wishes of my friends whom thought it was a lost cause as the drive was destroyed. I can't say I didn't think the same, but I didn't want to have to buy a new drive....so why not, right?
Well, after I got all the little pieces out, we all went into my room and plugged her back in. We kept our distance. I was sure to use a crappy CD that I didn't want and....god dammit.....the fucker worked! It read, copied, everything was fine, even at high speeds. I just burned a CD with it yesterday and even that worked! So, I'm pretty happy about that. Not only was it an awesome random occurence, but it didn't even cost me a CD drive like I thought it would have.
There are more pictures on the server (eight pictures in total), just go to ftp://scat.hopto.org if you want to see them.
The end :).
Every once in a while, something will happen or I'll come to some relatively insignificant revelation and I'll say something like "I should write something about that on live journal", but more often than not I either forget or cannot find the motivation to type up a post. Last week, something happened that was awesome enough to motivate me to post, though :).
Let me start from the beginning. Me and my friends have gotten back into playing some Starcraft (an awesome strategy game) on the LAN up here (brings back memories). Well, my CD is a bit old and run down, but I managed to find it and get Starcraft to work, anyways. Our friend Joe wanted to play, but didn't have the CD and we didn't want to wait to copy the disk or depend on some random cracks. So, I know the drill, run down and give him the CD to install and start up the game, then take it out of his drive and back upstairs to my room and use it to boot the game for myself. This way, we can both play in essance on only one CD. I give it to him, go back up for about 15 minutes, come back down for the CD and I'm greeted with "It's not working..." etc. etc. Not only that, but he tells me about the huge (and exceptionally deep) scratch on my CD that mysteriously appeared...great. Now, I'm not judging anyone. Maybe it was there before and I just didn't notice, even though it installed that very morning on my machine just fine. Either way, it doesn't really matter, so I just take it and don't worry about it. It's not too tough to find a good copy of starcraft around the internet, anyways.
I bring the CD back up with this huge scratch in it, assuming it's not going to run at all...but miraculously, autorun starts up and then the game even launches up without any problems. Anyways, I join the LAN game (Joey is standing behind me, as he never got the game to work but wanted to watch) and all of a sudden I hear this huge snap. At first I'm worried it came from my computer, because starcraft happened to freeze right afterward, but then Joey says "I think it was one of my guitar strings, I'll be right back". There I am thinking "Yes! Wasn't my computer!". Anyways, my whole computer seems frozen, and I have to restart. When the computer restarts, it still can't detect the CD in the drive....weird. So, I open the CD drive (without looking at it right away) to see what's up, and all of a sudden I hear *ding ding ding*, like little pieces of metal crumbling to the floor...
Turns out, the snap we heard *did* come from my computer. My CD drive specifically. The crack in the CD wasn't able to handle the stress from spinning at high RPM's, and finally exploded while still in my drive. There were literally hundreds of little pieces of CD, it was a huge explosion.....I kid you not. The first thing I did, of course, was grab my camera and start taking pictures of it :).
So, I thought this was freaking awesome, I couldn't even be mad that almost for sure my drive was destroyed as this experience was far too cool. Anyways, so I unplug the drive and take it out...and I hear some suspicious dinging sounds inside, so I turn it upside down, and what do you know...
All of these little pieces of CD started coming out. The picture doesn't do how much fell out of that drive justice, as I shook most of it out into a garbage can....hehe, ridiculous.
So, I decide to take the drive apart and see what happened to its innards. And what do you know, the explosion launched sharp pieces of CD literally everywhere in the drive. All over the circuit board, the metal shielding, in between the gears, literally everywhere I was finding little green pieces of that starcraft CD. This is a picture, completely untampered with, of the drive right after I got the lid off it:
I spent about an hour picking little pieces of CD bits out of the drive, against the wishes of my friends whom thought it was a lost cause as the drive was destroyed. I can't say I didn't think the same, but I didn't want to have to buy a new drive....so why not, right?
Well, after I got all the little pieces out, we all went into my room and plugged her back in. We kept our distance. I was sure to use a crappy CD that I didn't want and....god dammit.....the fucker worked! It read, copied, everything was fine, even at high speeds. I just burned a CD with it yesterday and even that worked! So, I'm pretty happy about that. Not only was it an awesome random occurence, but it didn't even cost me a CD drive like I thought it would have.
There are more pictures on the server (eight pictures in total), just go to ftp://scat.hopto.org if you want to see them.
The end :).