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telepathic windshield wiper removal
Monday, November 19 2018
It was one of the cold, rainy late November days that make this season so needlessly miserable. On the plus side, this washed away much of the leaf-speckled snow, which will make salvaging firewood a less unpleasant chore next time I do it.
I commuted to work in the Prius, whose windshield wipers I'd just replaced. I hadn't bought windshield wipers in years and had been surprised at how expensive they'd been: $30 for two replacement blades. I'd also been surprised that wiper blades are now essentially standardized parts on modern automobiles, and that the only information relevant to selecting the correct blades is how long they should be (and a Prius, the two blades are different lengths).
I spent nearly all of my workday trying to figure out why Newtonsoft.Json.JsonConvert.SerializeObject() strips items out of the JSON it produces while System.Web.Script.Serialization.JavaScriptSerializer().Serialize() does not. Everything in C# is hairier than it needs to be, and trying to debug in a world of not-recastable non-string types is a headache. So it was almost a relief to be called back into the receipt printer madness when unpredictable things started happening with last week's install.
Another nice thing about the workday was a big container uncommonly-delicious (if gratuitously-oily) pasta leftover from Ray & Nancy's dinner party last night. It was so spicy that I didn't even need to add hot sauce.
On the drive home, the backup at the bridge replacement on US 209 had me feeling road-ragey. I was willing to let one person in from the right lane that signs had warned people not to get in, but that did not mean I was a sucker and would let in two people. When some asshole tried to pressure me into letting him in, I leaned on the horn and rode it until he was behind me. Shortly thereafter my main windshield wiper flew off, disappearing forever into the damp darkness of the US 209 shoulder, indicating either mental telepathic powers possessed by the person I hadn't let in, an incompetent wiper installation on my part, or some combination of the two.
Back at the house, a $62 replacement power supply board had come for the 27 inch Apple Cinema Display Sandor had given me on that day he helped me with those damn radiators at the Brick Mansion. Before installing the board, I compared a suspect solder near C331 on both boards. Interestingly, on the blown board a solder bridge had connected one side of three capacitors in a row, whereas on the replacement, the bridge only connected two of them. On the bad board, there seemed to be shorts across all three capacitors. And on the good board, none of those capacitors were shorted. When I installed the new board into the display, it came to life. At 2560 X 1440, it is now my highest resolution monitor!
Now that I had a gorgeous new monitor, it was tempting to replace the old 1600 X 1200 Samsung in my five-monitor Woodchuck display array. That monitor has been in service since the spring of 2006, making it twelve and a half years old. It's always had terrible contrast between pastel colors, and in recent months that problem has only gotten worse. At this point, it's pretty much useless for Google Maps, though in high-contrast applications like text editors and text-heavy websites, it's acceptable. Still, it would be nice to replace it with something better. The only thing that has kept me from using one of my existing monitors is that none of them have a picture as tall as 1200 pixels, and I never want to replace a monitor with one that is smaller in any dimension. The 2560 x 1440, though, was bigger in every dimension. Unfortunately, being an Apple product, the only form of video input it accepted was DisplayPort. None of the video cards I had installed in Woodchuck had DisplayPort. But Sandor had given me an old GTX 750 gaming video card with lots of ports, including DisplayPort, This card is a monster and seemed to require extra power cables that my particular power supply did not have, but I thought it might work as a conventional video card, since I am not actually a gamer. I had trouble finding room for the beast, what with all the cables and such, but I eventually shoehorned it in. Unfortunately, though, I couldn't get it to work even with the proper drivers installed. It seems it might actually require those extra electrical cables to function. So then I had to take it out and put in the video card it had replaced. Had I seated it properly, the computer would've booted right back up with its five windows and all the icons where I want them. But no, only three monitors came up with the icons of all my nouns (files) and verbs (applications) scrambled uselessly in a grid, making the computer much harder to use than it would otherwise have been. I thought maybe I had to install drivers, so I kept downloading different ~250 megabyte files from Nvidia, but that wasn't the problem, so none of them worked. When I did finally seat the card correctly, all of my problems went away. Now, all I needed was a newer power supply and perhaps a mini-DisplayPort to DisplayPort adapter.
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