This morning I thought I’d clean out some of the accumulated dust from my PC at home. I’ve done this before, as I’ve noticed that the CPU’s heat sink and fan particularly gets quite a covering of dust and lint, and I presume this isn’t helpful in keeping things nice and cool.

Things were fine until I tried to lever off the fan that sits on the CPU heat sink. In prying it off, I also managed to unseat the CPU from its socket.

The problem is that the CPU has the heat sink firmly attached to it, and the heat sink is wide enough that you can’t access the zero-insertion force lever on the socket.

Initial attempts to separate the CPU from the heat sink were not successful.

I’m confident that the hard disks are fine, though it is a bit tricker than usual as I had utilised the on-board RAID feature of the D865PERL motherboard to stripe two hard disks into one large disk. Because of this I’d prefer to get the CPU back and working rather than have to consider pulling out the hard disks and trying to get them to work in a different PC - even if it was the same model.

Anyway, now that I’ve got into work, I have found this useful article on removing and re-attaching the heat sink. I’ll have another go tonight and see if I can have more success.

It was nice to see that some of the expanded documentation I contributed to the MbUnit site has been noticed by Andrew (the main developer of MbUnit).

That’s one great thing about using a Wiki is that anyone (like me) can jump in and add or expand the information.

It also turned out to be a great way to learn about some of the features of MbUnit that I hadn’t bee aware of before too.

Our team continues to grow - Jagruti has joined us on contract, bring our team’s developer count to 6.

This is great, though it does make using the 5-user license of Team Foundation Server a bit of a juggling match :-)

No, her name does not end in an ‘s’ - someone somewhere did a typo (but we don’t want a culture of blame), and it’s taking a few days for the correction to filter through to all the various systems.

I’ve just wasted a few hours trying to get an idbag working, but it turns out that it it doesn’t work for identity columns.

I’d noticed the comment in the documentation that ‘native’ columns are not supported.  What I hadn’t realised what that ‘identity’ is a native column.

I wish they’d fix this.

A few more things that have come to mind.

• Lunches seemed a bit rushed. I was surprised to see that Wagga’s schedule only allowed 30 minutes for lunch too.

  Even though I liked the BBQ, they did appear to have problems keeping up with demand - eg. the second tray of cooked food came out just as we were heading back in.

• Not enough time for questions. Most sessions probably ran over-time (I suspect I was guilty of this too). Having a consistent 5 minute warning would probably help everything keep on track better.

• A better web site. I’m not convinced that the “news” page on ADNUG’s site was the best place to promote the event and session times. Carl and Richard from DotNetRocks seem to agree - I was pleased that the event was promoted on their podcast, but they commented a number of times about the lack of information on the web page.

  I’m thinking it either needs its own independent web site, or see if we can have a space on CodeCampOz.

Don’t get me wrong, while I’ve listed things that I think could be improved, I did enjoy the weekend and got a lot out of it!