Something about being Joe.

There's something about me that says "If there's a problem, chances are I can fix it." This is a good thing most of the time, but is not so great others.

For example, I love having a Toyota Corolla, because it's extremely conducive to me digging in for the occasional rebuilding the starter or pulling the radiator to de-gunk it. (I didn't say extremely easy, just extremely conducive. It's got elbow room!)

As another example, sometimes a girl wants a guy to just listen to her problems and validate her feelings. (Note, this is not the right to assert that you can fix anything, because sometimes a girl wants to just have the listening ear.)

And I must admit, I have a grand-old-time working toward fixes sometimes. Case in point? Designing an undercarriage for a chicken coop last weekend with my father-in-law. I was loving life there in the aisle at the tractor supply store, then down in the project shop in the basement trying to remember the equation for cutting speed of steel as a function of tool diameter. Nope, couldn't remember it, but found out that it needed to spin a bit faster with the 5/16" drill bit through life experience.

Here's a joke. When people were asking what we were up to, I told them we were installing wheels on the chicken coop for the local coop races. I thought that was great. At work today, I told some folks at lunch and they had a great laugh at the idea. They want to come see the race, if it ever happens. If it were to happen, we have some other friends that would have to come and be the jockeys at the race, since they are Coopriders! HAHAHA! Lovin it!

As an aside, Ian has this book called "My Dad Can Fix Anything," which I am flattered that he believes it. He has been known to assert this casually in his conversations at play-dates. He holds the bar pretty high for his old man.

So here's tonight's project. Remember the other week Jen took my picture with the laptop taken apart? We had a loose DC power jack in our netbook that makes it so the cord has to be "just so" in order to charge. Such is the result of repeated tugging/tripping over/abusing a power jack. On that night, I discovered that there were no loose solder joints, and that everything looked intact. So I made a note of the part number and had a manufacturer in China send me a replacement jack. {Cocky me thought I could whip out the soldering iron and slap a new one on pronto!}

Having taken the machine apart recently, that wasn't too much of a hassle. I was a bit perplexed at one hangup, though, until I remembered that screw under the yellow tape that says "Warranty Void if Tape is Removed or Torn." The yellow tape that I tore to take the machine apart the other week.

And there's the culprit! Gotcha now.

I had the old iron cooking the 7 connections on the jack for like 30 minutes. I've got a cheapo' iron, and there were 4 anchoring contacts, then three current-carrying electrodes. Yeah, once you get one hot, the others are cooled. I could tell that I was probably heating up the whole mother-board worth of ground lines, and was praying throughout the process that I wasn't cooking the machine. In the end, I got it off, with only a slightly torn PCB (printed circuit board) and slightly more worried that I had torn a copper lead that is critical to getting those precious 19 volts routed properly.

Getting the new one on went a little faster than getting the old on off, since I had the mounting holes empty and clean. Now the jack is installed and looks charming there. The big question, then, is 1. Did I get everything put back properly, and 2. Did I solve the problem?


Answer 1: Yes, everything got put back together, and the computer booted up nicely. I sighed a big relief that the electrode was still functional. Thank goodness. Otherwise, you can bet Jen'd be hankering for a new laptop. How else could we stream two Netflix shows at once?
Answer 2: The laptop still seems to have a loose connection, (though not AS loose as before), evidenced by switching between battery mode and power mode periodically even when plugged in.

THEREFORE: The repair that I did was probably not necessary and just was an exercise in spending time being geeky, money for electronics parts, and brain cells melting a product known in the State of California to cause cancer and birth defects (or other reproductive harm). I guess we'll have to go the easy route and just buy a new power brick.