Blown Fuses

So, we'd just got back from the gym last night.  I was playing with Flock and Typepad with a view to a 2008 project I'm playing with, and it went dark.  Got a torch, found the circuit breaker, nothing had tripped.  Call the building maintenance people - they live in Tacoma, so it'll be an hour.

We went to get some food from one of our favourite takeout places, only to find that there is a reason for us only using it for takeout.

Basically, the circuit breaker in the switch room had tripped.

Ouch.

We think the thermostat he blew up during the day was the culprit, so he changed it.  Still, I've asked for an electrician to be called in to review the power here.  On Christmas Day the oven started cooling down while I was cooking.  That's usually a sign of a power drop on the main supply.

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Media Centre Stuff and Questions

The Media Centre has been misbehaving a lot recently so I just dismantled it and removed about a cup full of fluff from the 3 main fans.  It's running quieter too.  I also, after our electrical work yesterday, put back the mains networking equipment.  Interestingly, suddenly, all is working pretty well.  Videos which previously stuttered horribly were playing reasonably well.

I haven't tried a full 720p DivX yet, as I suspect that might be still too much, but the iTune for MCE stuff played pretty well - which is good because I really do want some legal ways to get content if I just missed something.

One thing I realised when I had the lid off is the memory is 2x512MB DDRs...  now, I wanted to canvass such opinion about the improvements I'm likely to see in the system performance by getting 2x1GB instead.  It's cheaper than a new machine, but I don't really want to spend the money and find that the problem is the 1.8GHz processor.

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