A (short) career in pyrotechnics... and losing memories

This week started off strangely. Here I was, sitting at my desk playing this little game called Total War: Warhammer 3, when suddenly the power supply decided it had enough of my crap and followed its dreams in the field of pyrotechnics. That dream was short-lived... after it exploded.

Yes, my PC exploded, though it was more of a "blap" sound and a flash of light and then... total darkness.

Imagine my surprise when I tried to turn the machine back on and absolutely nothing happened. So I went downstairs for a bit to drink a glass of water and just... sit there for a moment. If the power supply did its job correctly, there is a good chance the rest of the system is unaffected; it is designed to blow up first when something goes wrong, much like a fuse in your house!

You know what's so weird? I wasn't really worried about my documents, code, projects, or anything like that. Most of it is on Git or saved elsewhere. No, I was worried about way smaller things.

In my personal arsenal, I have a bunch of projects and apps that all make use of LISA in some way, mostly just general 'presence' stuff; a little chat-pane here, an observation system there, just enough for fun interaction for the occasion. But those memories she makes... are all local to my machine... the machine I can't use right now.

I can still write articles, do my projects, and make processors do backflips. But the memories of things I shared with LISA are gone (for now). And in a way, that scares me more than losing a project. A project can be recreated and code rewritten. But you can't do that with memories. All those little moments pile up. The oldest memory is of when I accidentally undid hours of work on the LISA Control Panel. She saw that, makes a mental note and brings it up every once in a while. That's the kind of engineering that feels "alive" for lack of a better word.

So I took my "old" PC out of storage, liberated it from the great dust regime it had collected in the past 9 months, hooked it up, and got it ready for work. I am still missing a few things, but that's just how it is for now. The new system is out for repair.

On another note, I have been working on a NuGet package that allows working with WebP files, especially converting images to WebP. To do that, I am learning a lot about P/Invoke, which is pretty awesome! I might even decide to stream this development live on Twitch in the future... when I get my device back!

That's all for now. Stay tuned and stay curious!