octidextro.us

...I worked over at Wizards of the Coast. There's a Grand Prix tournament (record breaking turnout this weekend) for Magic: The Gathering over in Madrid, so I was all UTC+1. During my downtown there on Friday night / Saturday morning, I played Sins of a Solar Empire, and on Saturday night / Sunday morning, I built a very simple MVC-style templating system for a friend.

After work, I played Modern Warfare 2 (on the PS3 — you can probably guess what my PSN name is) and set a personal kill streak record (22 kills!) and played a match without dying.

I reapplied thermal paste on Nicole's MacBook. I don't know why, but from the factory it looks like they applied thermal paste like its purpose was to insulate these chips.

Last December, my nephew accidentally bumped a table, causing a glass of water to spill right into the back vents. I took the MacBook apart completely, hunting for liquid, but I'm guessing a combination of Nicole's quick reaction, winter's insanely dry air, and the insanely hot wood stove at my parents', and just taking it apart took care of it all. Of course, I didn't have any thermal paste at the time and combine that with the incredibly thick layer that was laid down... you can imagine it wasn't doing it's job very efficiently.

I figured out the best thing to use to apply thermal paste is the back of a plastic spoon. While I'm at it, allow me to also give you a couple more, what the french call, le pro-tips:

• Use tape, sticky side up, to keep screws from getting lost. I also keep the screws arranged analogously to their spatial relationship of the machine I'm taking apart. Keeps me from getting lost, as well. A large magnet might work as well, but I've got a semi-irrational fear of large magnets in proximity to computers¹.

• Stick a small magnet on your screw driver to temporarily magnetize it, to keep the tiny little screws from falling off and into your machine. Yeah, I know what I said in the last tip. Please also note that I qualified that with "semi-irrational".

• Backup before you do any of this. In fact, backup before you backup.

Now, I'm blogging it up while eating a bowl of ramen, as if I were some sort of nerd.