Yeah, I am at the library on the computer and not on my laptop at Starbucks because the laptop is still dead.
Radio Shock
I woke up out of a kind of depressing dream. In the dream, my music teacher from college was encouraging me about my music, saying that it was valid, or something...
It was still a kind of depressed feeling, but it was easy to shake off by just making a decision to.
I told myself to get up and sip coffee and do my exercises (I have 2 gallon jugs of water on each end of a bamboo pole of about 6 feet long that I use to do curls and "military presses") and then to get busy on the chores of :
A: Going to the food stamp place to ask them why I never got the phone call to do the interview which must be done every 6 months, pertaining to "re-determination," which I did, and:
B: Taking the laptop to Radio Shack, reminding them that I had bought it there, and asking them if I could plug a good AC adapter into it, to determine whether or not my (under $20) adapter is the problem.
The problem was that it wasn't.
A brand new adapter out of the box, green light glowing and all, failed to cause the white light to come on.
So, it seems that the white light is not there to tell one that the laptop is plugged in to a good outlet and is getting 19 volts to the thing, but rather that the thing is "on" and "running."
So the 19 volts must have to make it to another juncture, further inside, where some of it is routed to the white LED which tells the world that it is on.
I'm Going In There!
My next step will be to open the thing up and try to determine how far the power makes it past the input connector. Maybe there is a fuse. It would make sense to put the power "indicator" after any fuse that might blow, I guess.
I am probably going to make a "poor man's voltmeter" out of a guitar string and a flashlight bulb, an go poking around inside the thing, provided I can get the screws off the back. Otherwise I might have to poke around the pawn shops for the right screwdriver.
This will be a halfhearted effort and I won't be worried to much if I make matters worse by opening the back (i.e. having a couple extra parts leftover on the outside, after I replace the back cover).
I am leaning towards looking for a replacement that I can pop my hard drive into and go from there. The CD/DVD drive never worked on the thing from the time that I bought it
There is a rather large scratch in the screen from where some of the keys on the keyboard pressed into it after some of the heavy groceries in my backpack pressed upon it.
And, it of course fell off my desk and onto the floor, after I stepped on the cord and yanked it there, and this ruined one of the USB ports that the Snowball microphone was plugged into, and bent but didn't break the very same input that power does not seem to be getting past now.
Reinvestment
So, whatever money that I was going to use to get a Visa Debit card so that I could use it to order parts, will now probably go into new strings and a new harmonica.
A guy came along last night with a ukulele and shot a video of us jamming and then gave me the Youtube address where he intended to post it.
I went there this morning and saw a 6 minute video of him walking around the Quarter and containing about 5 seconds of he and myself doing "What a Wonderful World," while a graphic popped up, saying "Jammed with this guy..."
It was right at the spot where I sing: "...not a bad world," in place of the original lyrics, and another popped up and said "nailed it" then.
Radio Shock
I woke up out of a kind of depressing dream. In the dream, my music teacher from college was encouraging me about my music, saying that it was valid, or something...
It was still a kind of depressed feeling, but it was easy to shake off by just making a decision to.
I told myself to get up and sip coffee and do my exercises (I have 2 gallon jugs of water on each end of a bamboo pole of about 6 feet long that I use to do curls and "military presses") and then to get busy on the chores of :
A: Going to the food stamp place to ask them why I never got the phone call to do the interview which must be done every 6 months, pertaining to "re-determination," which I did, and:
B: Taking the laptop to Radio Shack, reminding them that I had bought it there, and asking them if I could plug a good AC adapter into it, to determine whether or not my (under $20) adapter is the problem.
The problem was that it wasn't.
A brand new adapter out of the box, green light glowing and all, failed to cause the white light to come on.
So, it seems that the white light is not there to tell one that the laptop is plugged in to a good outlet and is getting 19 volts to the thing, but rather that the thing is "on" and "running."
So the 19 volts must have to make it to another juncture, further inside, where some of it is routed to the white LED which tells the world that it is on.
I'm Going In There!
My next step will be to open the thing up and try to determine how far the power makes it past the input connector. Maybe there is a fuse. It would make sense to put the power "indicator" after any fuse that might blow, I guess.
I am probably going to make a "poor man's voltmeter" out of a guitar string and a flashlight bulb, an go poking around inside the thing, provided I can get the screws off the back. Otherwise I might have to poke around the pawn shops for the right screwdriver.
This will be a halfhearted effort and I won't be worried to much if I make matters worse by opening the back (i.e. having a couple extra parts leftover on the outside, after I replace the back cover).
I am leaning towards looking for a replacement that I can pop my hard drive into and go from there. The CD/DVD drive never worked on the thing from the time that I bought it
There is a rather large scratch in the screen from where some of the keys on the keyboard pressed into it after some of the heavy groceries in my backpack pressed upon it.
And, it of course fell off my desk and onto the floor, after I stepped on the cord and yanked it there, and this ruined one of the USB ports that the Snowball microphone was plugged into, and bent but didn't break the very same input that power does not seem to be getting past now.
Reinvestment
So, whatever money that I was going to use to get a Visa Debit card so that I could use it to order parts, will now probably go into new strings and a new harmonica.
A guy came along last night with a ukulele and shot a video of us jamming and then gave me the Youtube address where he intended to post it.
I went there this morning and saw a 6 minute video of him walking around the Quarter and containing about 5 seconds of he and myself doing "What a Wonderful World," while a graphic popped up, saying "Jammed with this guy..."
It was right at the spot where I sing: "...not a bad world," in place of the original lyrics, and another popped up and said "nailed it" then.
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