Hurrah!

I was sitting at work today when an angel flew in from behind, spread his wings and said: "perkele, tää kone pitää ihan kamalaa ääntä".

OK, it was our system administrator and not really a real angel, but I couldn't be more glad if it were. He dragged some computer skeleton out of somewhere, put my hard drive and a couple of memory sticks in it, reconfigured the xserver, figured the mouse doesn't work, swore, replaced the mouse, swore again, replaced the mouse again, and the mouse came alive and started working erratically in a constipated way. One more iteration of swearing and mouse-replacement got it working properly.

Now all the problems are gone. The constipation when reading the hard drive. The sounds reminsiscent of a falling helicopter with occasional high whistling and groaning. Weird waves of color on the screen. All the programs that use sound card mysteriously crashing. Booting by itself. Kernel panic on boot. The light smell of smoke from the power supply.

Funny thing is, if it were my own computer, I would have gone to the store and replaced the broken pieces months ago. But somehow at work it's too much trouble to look through the existing hardware and ask bosses for money and drag my ass from the warm ofice to the cold street, etc.

Thank god for system administrators.