As expected, Monday and Tuesday turned into absolute scorchers and in a land almost entirely devoid of real air conditioning units in domestic settings, it was pretty nasty and definitely uncomfortable. The thermometer on the left is decently accurate and, although that shot was taken with it in the sun, when it was placed in the shade, it was still showing 37°C.
And that was outside! Inside the house, the temperatures just kept rising and the decision to shutdown all my servers in the loft for the duration turned out to have been wise, I think!
Unfortunately, I didn't think to turn my main PC off. It's in a study which whilst certainly on the hot side of things wasn't exactly the oven that the loft can become, so I simply didn't see the need to switch it off. Indeed, I was happily coding and using the Internet yesterday just fine. It is something of a shame, then, to have to report that on walking into my study this morning (balmy temperatures of 27°C) I found the computer powered down. Odd, I thought: don't remember turning it off last night! But no problems... turn it on now... and ...unable to find boot loader. Repeat and rinse.
What we are looking at here, my friends, is the complete failure of an SSD, purchased in February 2022 (a Crucial MX500 if you want to avoid the brand in future!). I've actually never had an SSD fail before: I'm still routinely using one I purchased in 2013, for example (a Samsung 840, if you want to use that brand in future!). So that's a bit of a bummer... especially as my working copy of the Giocoso version 2 code was stored on it. I have a backup from Sunday afternoon, so I don't think I've actually lost anything from it, but I can't remember if I wrote any new code on the Sunday evening. It's gone for now if I have.
The Crucial SSD is currently sitting in my freezer (I think I recall hearing an old wives' tale about that possibly being able to revive one for long enough to extract data from it), but I am fairly confident it has gone forever and isn't merely pining for the fjords. I am typing this on my Mac Mini, awaiting delivery of a same-day replacement SSD from Amazon.
Anyway: the worst of the heat appears to be behind us; little if any Giocoso 2 code has been lost; I'm therefore now looking to the end of this week for final Giocoso version 2 release, with one last check of the documentation to make sure it's accurate and of acceptable quality. Brace yourselves!