Playing with silicon

I learned the following advice through experience won by travelling to yesterday's LAN party.

Never juggle with computers. Juggle with balls, with rubber chickens, with fire, even with chainsaws if you must, but never, ever juggle with a desktop machine. Especially over concrete slabs.

Even if you don't really care about the machine in question or the data thereon, you still must not juggle with it. Owing to long experience playing fps games, the box will know that in general you can greatly reduce fall damage by skimming the cliff face you are falling past and bouncing off any sticky-out bits that are handy. In this case, the sticky-out bits are your knees, and for them it will not be a salutary experience.

In a not entirely unrelated way, I learned yesterday that Mekanorimon (my desktop box) is much more resilient to sudden acceleration than a lay-person might have thought. This was not as much a surprise to me as you might think, because at the previous LAN party it survived doing a back-flip out of my bike trailer in an extremely humorous manner.