06-18-10. Pond Scum at Valley Water Mill Lake. I occasionally drive past this lake on my way home from work, and I've noticed the scum has gradually overtaken the lake in the last few months. Who wants to go for a swim?
06-17-10. I've done this same type of thing a while back, but guess what it is.
06-16-10. Ellen's old laptop at Boyer PC Hospital. SYMPTOMS: Won't turn on, charge a battery, or anything else that resembles getting power. External power supply tested ok. PROBLEM: DC jack not making proper contact between the power cord and motherboard. This is apparently a pretty common problem among laptops as the DC jack takes a lot of abuse when the cord is repeatedly inserted/removed or otherwise roughly handled. A couple of small solder joints are the only thing connecting it to the mother board, and the joints must be perfect in order to transfer power. SOLUTION: Completely disassemble the entire laptop, which involves lots of tiny screws, delicate connections, and lots of other things that can get messed up. The jack itself is probably the simplest part on the whole thing, and the solder joint is pretty straightforward too, but getting to it is the hard part. I can't believe for such a common problem, they don't come up with a better design or at least make it more accessible to fix. Re-soldering the joint was a little trickier than I thought because there were a lot of other solder joints in close proximity to the one that needed fixing. Needless to say, it took a steady hand. Reassembly wasn't quite as bad as disassembly. I did test my work with a multimeter before putting it all back together. I also hooked up the power cord and battery to the mother board, and the led lit up to show that the battery was charging. I didn't want to waste my time putting it back together if I didn't really fix it. After putting it all back together, it booted right up. Next up- wipe it clean and reinstall the operating system.
