Conjuration

"The essential Saltes of Animals may be so prepared and preserved, that an ingenious Man may have the whole Ark of Noah in his own Studie, and raise the fine Shape of an Animal out of its Ashes at his Pleasure; and by the lyke Method from the essential Saltes of humane Dust, a Philosopher may, without any criminal Necromancy, call up the Shape of any dead Ancestour from the Dust whereinto his Bodie has been incinerated."

After spending enough time around computers that are doing everything in their power to self-destruct, you start to learn little quirks and tricks to get more information about the computer than it will seem to yield upon initial inspection.

Lemma: as a rule, Windows's Event Viewer is a piece of junk for serious forensic use.

I came home last night to find that my workstation had locked up at some point in the week while I was gone. I got it back up on its feet tonight, but I don't have any really good way of pinpointing precisely when the explosion happened. One of the biggest flaws of the Windows platform is that they have gone to great pains to keep your ordinary average user from ever having to touch a logfile. They've been so thorough in this crusade that they've ensured that basic logfiles are denied to even extraordinary users.

Fortunately, I enabled NTP on my workstation on 2009-01-06, so I have a record of my CPU's time offset and frequency for every period of time since then. I have a full day's worth of datapoints on 2009-03-02, but only about 6 hours' worth of data for 2009-03-03. Therefore, and without any criminal necromancy, I can pretty much clue in that whatever the problem was, it happened shortly after 5:45 AM UTC on 2009-03-03. If I recall correctly, I was sitting shoreside at the time watching the sun set over a glass of wine and some seared ahi tuna. One of the many joys of being so close to the International Date Line, I suppose.