I returned from Rome a week ago last Friday. I’ve been busy with work non-stop since then, so the detailed debrief post will have to wait until later this weekend.

I shot 1000+ photos, plus whatever Rebecca shot, and I even geocoded them all with the sweet geocoding feature in Google Picasa. Why, then, haven’t I posted them? Read on…

I awoke Monday morning to the soothing tone of one of my UPSs on overload. Upon further investigation, the culprit was the APC BackUPS XP 900 that keeps aenea my 1TG SATA RAID NAS box going.

I powered down all the connected devices (a CRT, aenea, and boromir, the direct-to-disk backup of aenea), and figured I’d worry about it when I got home from work. When I got home (12 hours later) I tried to power on aenea, only to find that a few seconds after power on, her power would go dead, LEDs would go out, and fans would spin down, then a few seconds after that power would come back on, and of, and on, etc. It doesn’t take a genius to peg this as PSU failure.

aenea is in an Aspire X-Alien case, which came with its own Aspire-branded 430W PSU. It seemed ok, but then again, in over 10 years of hardware hacking this is the first time I’ve had a PSU fail, so I obviously wouldn’t know. I thought about whipping out my multimeter, measuring voltage on the rails, maybe power output in the few seconds when it will boot, but I didn’t see the point. So, I ordered a Thermaltake 500W PSU and waited.

Yesterday it arrived, and I dropped it in without incident. It has a 120mm fan, and nicer cables than the OEM PSU that came before it, plus its quieter. aenea suffered some file system damage as a result of the outage, but it was nothing a little fsck couldn’t cure.

Now, at last, after that yak-shaving expedition, I can actually get around to posting my photos, which are stored on aenea (yes, they’re backed up on boromir, but it’s the spirit of the thing). That, and watching my evaluation-purposes-only DVD rips from my friend the guy who uses BitTorrent…