Comcast added some extra security measures recently that practically blocked us out of our own account. It's a long story, and while I'm sure you'd love hearing me complain about it, I'm just going to skip it.
In any case, I got this sent to my comcast.net email address this morning:
Dear MATTHEW AUAYAN,
Our records show that you recently changed the email password on your account. If you did not authorize this change, please call Comcast at 1-800-COMCAST and we'll be happy to assist in any way we can.
Your security is top priority at Comcast! To learn more, visit our FAQs at www.comcast.com.
Best regards,
The Comcast Team\r\n[EventId:60097249:/EventId]
I bet when my Comcast phone service goes out, they diligently call me on my Comcast phone line to notify me of the interruption of service1.
February 28, 2010 – 1:53 pm
...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.
