The Temple of the Mighty Bague

I’ve just had a server returned by a client. Apparently it keeps overheating and dying. It’s a 1u box and they swear blind they’ve left a ventilation gap and have aircon in the server room. So, I popped the lid and had a look.

 The first thing that struck me was the amount of muck, crap and dust inside the box. The fans were so full of nasty sticky gungey fluff that they refused to turn. That certainly explains the overheating. I suspect that the server may have been stored in a chicken coop rather than a server room.

Given that I had the top off it to give it a good clean, I reckoned it was only sensible to have a good poke around the thing to make sure there wasn’t any glaring damage. Fairly quickly, I spotted a few places where the temperature had got high enough to cos some solder joints to leak flux. Not a good sign.

Then I saw this. A couple of pins on an interface point which had been bent over so extremely that they were shorting out. “Hmm,” thought I, “that’s not a Good Thing.” Question is, how in god’s name did they get in there to bend the pins? The top panel at this point is actually rivetted in…. ah. The rivets have been drilled out on the side of the casing. 

Anyway, at this point I pulled out the vacuum cleaner in order to give it a good hoovering out. Half an hour of intensive disassembly and cleaning and all the fans on the mainboard were functional. The fan at the front of the power supply assembly were not. So, slid the power supply out and squinted in the back of the box. Dear oh dear - it’s not looking good for you, mister server. I have only one option left open to me:

The Anal Probe…..

I really dread to think what google search strings are going to appear in my web stats next month.

Yup, for want of anything better to say, its time for some introspective navel-gazing. And today it’s about music - specifically the weird things that happen to your taste in music as you get older. See, my taste in music has always been a bit odd, with Richard Wagner happily sharing shelf space with Metallica or Turisas or something. So I’d stick a mix on my ipod and happily listen to a playlist of something like the last act of Die Walküre, followed by a bit of DragonForce, then a couple of tracks from Murder Ballads (Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds), and then a bit of brass band music, maybe some Paul Simon - just random stuff. And I enjoy it equally.

I’ve always been a little worried about what would happen to my tastes as I begin to advance in years - a very good friend of mine, a bona-fide survivor of the sixties, developed a scary penchant for Country Music (The Music Of Pain). Strangely, though, my tastes seem to be getting a bit louder and a bit stranger with every passing year.

Sure, I’ve always liked less obvious (i.e. more challenging) music - I prefer Schöenberg to Mozart, for example. I like Nick Cave’s lyricism and discordances more than the easier-listening clash inspired Kaiser Chiefs, as another example. Lately, though, it’s just gone a bit nuts. Because I’ll play stuff by all four of those artists, frequently back to back and enjoy the juxtapose just as much as the individual pieces.

Now here’s the REALLY wierd thing - as most of the stuff I listen to gets punted to last.fm, imagine my horror to discover that I’m not special after all! There’s LOADS of people whose taste in music is just as mental as mine! So what is it? Am I a pretentious art-wank who only likes stuff nobody else does? Do I just have no definable taste in music? Or does everyone just like what they like and to hell with trying to pigeon hole it?

I don’t know - what are you looking at me for? I think the best thing to do is to get on with listening to my music and not think about it any more.

Which leads neatly into:

ACE Lyric #4

All the best freaks are here, please stop staring at me.

Marillion - Freaks.

“Yobadobba yobadobba yobadobba yobadobba yobadobba yobadobba yom POM POM!

Yobadobba yobadobba yobadobba yobadobba yobadobba yobadobba yom POM POM!

Ahhhh Ahhhhh AHHHH AHHHHHH AHHHHHHHHH AAAHHHHH AHHHHHHHHHHH!”

Focus - “Hocus Pocus”

“As the sun beats down and I lie on the bench, I can always hear them talk.

Me? I’m just a lawnmower. You can tell me by the way I walk.”

Genesis - “I Know What I Like (In Your Wardrobe)”

Well, there’s a turnip for the books. Last couple of days, I’ve twittered a random lyric that I’d either been listening to or just popped into my head. Imagine my surprise when I started getting TONS of feedback from people who either liked the lyric and wanted to know the song, hated it, or anything in between. So, I thought to myself, I could do a lot worse than just blat a fave lyric on here once a day. Shouldn’t be too difficult. So, without further ado:

“You’re one microscopic cog in his catastrophic plan,
Designed and directed by his red right hand.”

- Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, “Red Right Hand”