• woke up late for meeting. rushed to get to the kingdomhall on time. turns out i wasn’t as late as i thought.
• awesome talk, awesome watchtower study. awesome.
• bento with all of south bay. i mean literally. sat at the bosses table with the usuals + ian jay and jaymar.
• joked around about homophobes and what jec and i plan to do to a homophobe that we know. commence laughter. LOUD laughter.
• chill at jec’s for a bit, pick up a CPU for real cheap for jerome, then walk around the container store while my brother shops for shelves for his room.
• rush back to chula vista because we were late for our 3pm meeting for duncan ranch maintenance/sound/phone/ac/security training. turns out we weren’t late at all.
• awesome 3pm meeting. chilled around duncan ranch with josh and kuya sonny until our 5pm meeting.
• after the 5pm meeting, we spent some time in the west hall with leonard, jay, josh, the riveras, the santos’ and the angeles. everyone was claiming their seats and parking spaces while josh jay leonard and i made a few decisions for the stage, sound and literature/magazine counter. excited fun.
• picked up some L&L. that’s always a good thing.
• chilled with jerome before putting together the final touches on his computer.

here’s where the day takes a complete 180

• i get home and find one of my two triops dead.
• we put in the new cpu. the PC still doesn’t start up. definitely not a cpu problem. must be the motherboard (memory and PSU already tested at this point. the only other culpurits were the cpu and mobo). newegg mobo was pronounced dead on arrival.
• i take apart the HTPC and drop a screw in the freaking power supply. i have to remove it later on. go me.
• taking out a motherboard with the entire watercooling system is no easy task.
• jerome’s cpu cooler is too large for the motherboard. the screws dont fit. the only other screws we had were 2″ long which we had to remove material from so it wouldn’t hit anything on the cooler.
• i screw the cooler in the wrong order (washer, nut, washer, etc). i spent 10 minutes doing this only for it to be removed again.
• we toss the motherboard in. boots up. but josh and i forget to rearrange the brass standoffs. this means a shorted motherboard.
• we spend an hour trying to turn on the motherboard since it keeps shutting off. we check everything and find the short after the hour’s gone.
• after loosening the board so the short doesn’t happen, we start up the pc. it boots. but then the motherboard starts to smoke and one of the voltage regulator’s turns red. goodbye motherboard. (the brass shorted the bottom of the regulator’s soldering, re-soldering it to another point on the circuit board, causing it to heat up constantly and die on us).

total losses at the end of the night:

1. $20 socket 478 cpu that is useless to us.
2. $90 xfx 630i hdmi motherboard that shorted out.
3. $50 pair of ocz memory sticks (night before)
4. $70 motherboard from newegg was DOA. 15% restocking fee and shipping fees for the refund.