Down with the Sickness

Has it really been almost three weeks since I put anything up here? I'm shocked that anyone's stuck around this long!
Oh wait, the joke's on me; they haven't. In fact, I built it but they never came. Chalk up another lie the media has fed me, along with those grand turds of deceit afloat in the great salty brine of life that tell us that we'll all grow up to be rich and famous and ultimately happy... not that I want to bring a downer on you. No.


Mayhaps I could explain what I've been doing with my verdant and unblemished time spent not uploading streams of conscious into the aether of unread prose that is the web. Sadly, the answer is not a great deal. When last we parted, you and I, I'd been... what was- ah yes, flailing at my computer's innards like a wet noodle slapping limply at a fly, decrying the foul machinations of whoever designed this cramped ATX form factor.
Luckily I never mentioned the best part of that whole endeavour, and when I say best I mean worst, 'cos that's how I roll.
As I nipped down the stairs in what would become a vain attempt at cannibalising my old model machine, deciding not to turn on the hall light at an ungodly hour, I noticed through the glass in the front door that the streetlights had gone off. So there I am pawing my way through the darkness into the front room where the light would go unnoticed, and my fruitless search for components would begin. Anyway, longwinded and tedious story cut gleefully short, on the way back through the opressive and cloying darkness, I managed to knock over my dog's water bowl.
Frantic gathering and applying of absorbancies later, I creep back upstairs and, damn, the streetlights are back on. Fate, she toys with me as a dog does a bone or rubber replacement.
Of course I would've reported back to you, oh omniscient peruser, but I caught a bit of a nasty cough and frankly could NOT be arsed.

Hell, I'm only doing this out of sheer lack of options and it's not gone at all the way I thought it would. Seems that as soon as I sit down, everything I wanted to type about flies out of my head like a fainting goat, shot out of a cannon.

No, I don't know why the type of goat matters either, but one of those little buggers with the four horns would be utterly terrifying propelled through somebody's front window at ballistic speeds...

The Broken

I'm cursed, I tell you.

Electronics, at once the most fun I have with my clothes on and the bane of my tepid existence. So rife with possibilities in all their myriad forms and yet so damning with their ruinous disregard for my desires and well-being.
Eeeeeverything seems to malfunction around me, which is somewhat aggravating when it seems like 90% of my life is lived on the net. Maybe that's just a failing of my priorities. Anyway.

The system downstairs, an ageing and dust-clogged relic, has begun in recent days to sound less like a smooth wireless-serving platform and more like a tractor rending the slow country by-lanes into so much rubble and dust, acrid in the lungs and cloying in the throat. It's not a pretty sound.
Deciding that it's likely a problem with the power supply, I order a new one and a pair of new hard drives for my own little terminal, generous as I am. After installing the new PSU however... yeah, that's not the problem. Bugger.
Ah well, I'll cheer myself up installing these new spacious magnetic discs! Now, SATA ports... yeah, there they are. Now where's my cables...

... cables...

Cables? Hello, SATA cables?

Bugger.
Right, let's hunt through the big box of PC spares and scraps for those spare SATA cables I'm sure I possess... but oh, what's this?

... it's an as-new power supply.

...