As of yesterday, Jo and I completed our second dose of the COVID-19 vaccines, and I feel much better knowing that we have some sort of protection against COVID. In the Beginning Romania started its vaccination program quite early, as early as December 26, 2020. The vaccine rollout was done in three stages: Stage 1: For Health Care Workers Stage 2: For high-risk population (age 65+) and people working in key areas such as public transport etc Stage 3: For the general public While stage 1 started on December 26, stage 2 started around about Mid February and stage 3 was most interesting - it started with the opening of the waitlist on March 15 and vaccinations starting on March 31.

It started with a noticed posted on the door of my apartment way back in Late October, stating that the district heating would start soon. I couldn’t believe that Winter was coming so soon but saw on news about first snowfall in the mountains as early as late September and I knew we were in for some early snow. Few months in, we’ve had more number of snowy days here in Bucharest as compared to last year, but still much lesser in volume as compared to last year.

Last week, Jo and I completed our Seventh wedding anniversary. All these years have gone by so fast, it’s hard to believe we’ve been together for so long. The pandemic has been quite hard on us. While I moved to Bucharest last year, we were waiting for Jo to get her paperwork done. And just as we got her paperwork done and submitted to the Embassy, the Indian govt imposed the lockdown in India, and accordingly the Embassy shutdown, cancelling all appointments.

When I moved into current house, I was quite happy to note that there was construction going on for Bucharest Metro M5 line. Having a metro right next to your house is of course quite nice to have, considering it makes getting into and out of the city that much easier. My landlady, however, brushed off my optimism mentioning that the M5 metro line has been under construction since a long time and most had given hope on it.

It’s been 7 months since I’ve been in Bucharest. The past couple of months I’ve been under quarantine and staying indoors. That aside, people kept asking me how’s it been in Bucharest and how’s life been in Bucharest, how different life is compared to Bangalore. Sunset at Bucharest Moving across the world is a huge endeavour and even though I’ve done my share of travels, moving and settling in Bucharest while smooth, experiencing day to day life in Bucharest took me by surprise.

I returned to Bucharest from my 15-day visit to India on the the first of March. The next day as I was walking to office, something was different. The flower shops were livelier than usual. The Mall was buzzing with a lot of small vendors, selling red and white trinkets with flashy boards. I thought these were because of some sort of sale and just passed by them. Trinkets at Plaza Romania Mall Flower Shop Then when I reached office, I saw more such flowers, chocolates and trinkets.

It’s been a while since I posted anything, so lets get this started again. As I had tweeted few weeks back, I have moved to Bucharest, Romania.

Ah 2017. What a year of unexpected twists and turns, an unexpected job change and an even bigger financial drain. Let’s see how the year went by

So I just got my passport reissued this week and I’m amazed how far things have come. I got my passport done close to a decade back when I had to fly to Austin. Back then getting a passport done was a pain - I had applied from Mangalore in Tatkal and since Mangalore didn’t have a tatkal processing system, it was forwarded to the Bangalore passport centre. I still vividly remember the day I visited - I stood in queue at 8am (was told to go early because the counter was open only till 12pm), stood there for hours after some initial confusion on where to go(which lost me a whole bunch of spots) and when I was 2 spots away from reaching the counter, the guy at the counter shut down saying they’re doing for the day even though it was 11:45am. Was so pissed but really couldn’t do anything but go back. The next day I went and stood in the line at slightly before 7 and somehow got through the document submission and had to patiently wait.

It’s been about 4 years since I built Hellforge. It’s gotten some updates:

• Replaced Gigabyte 7750 with an Asus Strix 970
• Added on a Samsung Evo 840 256GB
• Memory upped to 16GB
• Replaced the Logitech K210 keyboard with a Corsair K70 Lux RGB
• Replaced the CM default case fans with Bitfenix Spectre

But the one thing that has remained constant: the CPU heat sink and cooler. My old house was dusty and no matter how much I cleaned, within a week or two there’d be quite a lot of dust. I did a  bit of superficial cleaning on the insides but never bothered cleaning the CPU heat sink/fan.

The hesitation comes mainly because I had a torrid time when installing the heat sink the first time and didn’t want to damage it. Off late the processor’s been running hot and the CPU fan’s been on overdrive pretty much all the time. Last week I was curious about the temperatures it was running at and HWMonitor - I wasn’t prepared for this.

That's not a good sign. pic.twitter.com/dOZL4BRnL9

— Sathyajith Bhat (@SathyaBhat) May 14, 2017

Basically the temperatures were close to Tj Max and I wonder how come the CPU wasn’t throttling. With temperatures at this level, I had to do something about this. And egged on with support of Alpha, I decided it’s time to clean it up.

Here’s what I bought to clean up:

• Compressed air can -  A blast of this can get a lot of dust off but you need to keep this straight, so difficult to use this for hard to reach surfaces
• Hand pump - really useful for the hard-to-reach surfaces which can’t be reached above
• Isopropyl Alcohol - You’re going to use this to wipe off the remaining gunk off the heat sink and the CPU.
• Some tissues/cotton swabs to clean up the gunk
• CoolerMaster MasterGel - I settled on this after extensive discussion with Alpha. He suggested to get the cheaper one, since the higher priced version is more suited for overclockers

Now, for the pictures. You’ve been warned. This was how it was when I opened the cabinet