Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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   day devoured by a pi-shaped cable
Saturday, April 21 2018
This afternoon I took the dogs on a drive out the the West Hurley Hannaford, where I bought some things I needed. The most pressing of these was flat bread. (I'd had to eat chana masala with corn chips yesterday, and the two do not go together well at all.) But also got orange juice, grapefruit juice, a six pack of Little Sumpin' Sumpin', pizza crusts, Del Monte fresh cut green beans, and a Bento box of vegan sushi. On the way back home, I stopped at the Tibetan Center thrift store. The Tibetan Center itself was mobbed like I'd never seen it (was the Dalai Lama in town?), though few people were in the thrift store. Rob was the guy at the counter, so if there was anything I would've wanted to buy, today would've been the day to buy it. But there was nothing there for me today.

I spent much of the rest of the day dealing with a vexing electronics issue. It seems every time I get a crappy cheap partial Elitebook 2740p for spare parts, I end up having enough left over to build another actual laptop. I certainly don't need a third such laptop, but with one tantalizingly close to working, it tends to take up my mental space. The problem with getting third one working was the tendency of its screen to flicker and occasionally die when the lid hinge was moved. Some experiments demonstrated that the problem as entirely with the backlight. Fixing it, though, seemed close but (for hours at least) just out of reach. After noticing that the screen flickered when I tapped a connection to a long-narrow board just below the screen, I tried replacing that board with a known good one, but this fixed nothing. So then I tried replacing a pi-shapped ribbon cable carrying the monitor signals. That seemed to work, but then after a few seconds the screen would die. Infuriatingly, the screen would come back to life if I just tapped the side of that pi-shaped cable. All of these later experiments were done without hooking up that long, narrow circuit board (as it seemed to be unrelated to screen function). But then, when I hooked it up, all the problems with the screen dying after a few seconds were gone. It seems that replacing the pi-shaped cable had been the actual fix.

This evening I made a bean glurp (the sort used as the chief content of a burrito). I had a bunch of green material: a tub of organic lettuce and a tub of organic spring greens, and without Gretchen around to help me eat them, they were destined to go bad. But spinach cooks down to nothing, so I could put all of it into the glurb, where it added dark green ribbons of color. As for the spring greens, one can add a lot of them to a burrito, and so I did to the three I would end up eating today. Still, the small dent I managed to make in that tub doesn't give me much hope that Gretchen (she returns on Sunday) and I will be able to eat it all before it goes bad.


For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?180421

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