Dispatches from the Eccentric Frontier

On the way back to your plane, you discover that the only bit of shade within 1 mile has become very popular.

You start calculating the distance to the plane door and wonder: “Do I feel lucky today?”

Thus far, Yeti has invented rug surfing (where he races down the length of the house and pounces on a rug that’s sitting on the hardwood floor, causing it to slide along the floor with his momentum and eventually block the door when I come home at night), ice hockey (where he bats ice cubes around), and hide-and-seek (where he notices that I’m coming to collect the kittens and take them to the bedroom for the night and zooms away from me, lurks someplace, then zooms again when I find him, and repeats until he decides he wants to let me catch him).

Cleo has observed the hide-and-seek game, and has come up with her own version: she notices that I’m herding kittens to bed and lurks under the dining table (one of Yeti’s preferred hiding spots during hide-and-seek), then as soon as I’m getting under the table to pick her up, she zooms over to the cat tree and scratches on it, a behavior that she well knows is frequently rewarded with treats. She’s quite the little mercenary.

Given that Maine Coons, as a breed, tend to play with water, this may just be his way of cooling off to start a summer’s day. Given how much fur the guy’s carrying around (even in his summer coat), I can’t blame him.

So we’ll have to try this another few times and see if it does the trick...

I wondered if it was the system overheating, but shutting it down and giving it time to cool off didn’t fix the problem. Then I thought it was the hard drive going out. The EZgo was failing to boot all the way— it’d just freeze while doing a filesystem check. I spent some time setting up Linux on a second hard drive on the other PC, transferred all my files to the other PC (wondering why the hard drive seemed to work fine for that purpose when I was booting off the Linux rescue CD), reformatted the hard drive, and transferred all my files back. It worked fine for a few days, then started freezing again.

Fortunately, the fine folk at Directron are perfectly willing to say “go ahead, open the case up and see if you can fix it yourself, it won’t void your warranty” if you can talk a good line about knowing what you’re doing inside a machine. So I opened it up, figuring there might be a loose connection or something in there. One person on the online help forums suggested reseating the heat sink would also be a good idea.

When I got inside the box, there was a fair amount of dust... and fluff. Frizzy fluff. Frizzy cat fluff. Some of it was caught in one of the fans, some of it was blocking the heat sink.

You see, silver tabbies like Yeti are known for having very fine fur. Not only do they have fine straight hairs like ordinary cats, they also have a fuzzy, downy undercoat. I’ve found little fuzzy Yeti undercoat hairs in my contact lenses before. And sure enough, winter had rolled around and Yeti had grown his winter coat, and some of it got into the computer past the little screens on the intake fan.

Moral of this story: heat sensors on the motherboard are a useful feature.