A couple days ago we had an ice storm. Everything got covered with a lovely jacket of ice, much to my delight because ice is pretty. But there is a downside.
On the morning of the ice storm I slipped on the back steps and fell right on my ass. It was more undignified than anything else and the worst part was MrsDOF had just warned me about the steps, oh, a minute before. I picked myself up, dusted off, and went to work.
But my Lynksys/Cisco dual-band Wireless network card (shown here inserted in my rough-around-the-edges laptop) did not go to work with me. It flew from my shoulder bag, landing next to the back steps where it acquired a thick coating of ice. For three days I had no occasion to use it so I didn’t know it was missing.
Then today the ice began to melt and I found my card lying in a pool of ice water with water from the roof dripping right on it. Darn!, I said, or words to that effect, and scooped up the card. I sucked water out of it through the PCMCIA connection holes, dried it off with a towel, and warmed up the oven to about 110o F. I turned off the oven, placed the card on the rack, and waited 4 hours.
It works fine. Whew!
Reminds me of an incident at school in the early eighties. We had a few of the first new BBC microcomputers delivered and teacher borrowed one to use after school. Next day, carrying it from his car he dropped it in a large puddle.
I’ve never seen a more worried man use a hairdrier so carefully.
(Great old micros the BBC “B” machines, based on a 6502 chip with a whole 32K of memory and useful version of BASIC capable of simple robotics and voice processing; Oh no, not computing nostalgia!)
Simon