I’m sure there’s a deep metaphorical lesson in all this, I’m just not sure what it is:
I love my laptop; it was a big compromise when it was purchased. I had spent three years in Macbook Pro bliss. But, going to work for myself meant I needed to compromise. $2400 to replace the work macbookpro wasn’t going to be forthcoming. So, I ended up with a Lenovo laptop that for the last year and a half has been mostly great.
I say mostly great because about 9 months ago, right before the warranty ran out, the speakers started to go fuzzy. Lenovo offered to let me ship it to them so they could take a look. They estimated a four week turn around, and were adamant that if there was any exterior damage (and there is… it survived a pretty decent drop once, with a dinged edge to show for it), they’d only fix it at my cost. I figured, meh… it’s plugged into either my external monitor or earphones most of the time, so I never shipped it.
Which I came to regret four months later, when the fan started to click. At first, I thought it was my hard drive. That was stressful. Clicking hard drive = bad day. But, it was just the fan. It was already not the quietest machine, but a clicking fan was… well, annoying.
I ordered a replacement. I bought the right thermal grease. And then I sat on it, because, frankly, I didn’t want to tackle the enormous task of taking this laptop, which clocks in at .9 inches thick, apart and digging in the guts.
But I did it. I would go through the steps for you, but honestly, here’s what you need to know:
Lots of little screws.
Lots of little cables
I have giant hands
Somehow, I made it all the way through, and when I came out the other side and powered on the computer, everything worked.
Praise God! There was much prayer in the process, and much fretting, but at the end, everything works. And the fan is blissfully quiet. I’m a pretty happy man.
I guess the aesop-ish lesson is, even if you have sausage fingers, you can disconnect miniaturized io cables… if you’re careful.
Archives for January 2014
On Cynicism
I read this article from the Weekly Standard on the My Little Pony / Dudes phenomenon (ht: Challies)
The author tries to track the origins of the “Brony” (that is, bros-who-like-my-little-pony) movement, and a theme emerges. Several times, it seems, the idea emerges: liking My Little Pony genuinely is a way to fight cynicism and (unsaid, but my inference) hipster irony.
Now, look… I dislike my own cynicism. I’m not a huge fan of your cynicism either. I’m a big fan of genuine. I’m trying to do that better.
But, why my little pony? It still plays like an inside joke that you haven’t let the rest of us in on. In the words of Michael Scott, “I love inside jokes. I’d like to be a part of one someday.” But I’m not that interested in being part of an inside joke about My Little Pony.
The answer to cynicism isn’t to find something dumb and like it genuinely. It’s to find great things and love them genuinely. It’s okay for those to be things that other people don’t think are great. If it was four or five dudes telling me how great My Little Pony is, I might be convinced that it was genuine. But when it’s 12.4 million, I’m convinced it’s about joining a movement of people trying to fight cynicism, rather than actually just trying to fight cynicism. There is a difference, an important one.
It’s good to like things for their own sake. But, when you decide to like My Little Pony so that you can stick it to the cynical masses, you’re not liking My Little Pony for its own sake. You’re liking it for the sake of sticking it to the cynical masses. See what you did there?
Some thoughts…
when your kids are sick.
Hope I didn’t grab the colander by mistake.
Fear
The other night, I was driving my family home from my wife’s family Christmas event. We’d had a fun evening, Rebecca and I were talking about some things, it was a pleasant time. As we drove up a windy road, very suddenly there was a vehicle coming too fast in the other direction. He was in my lane, and he was not in complete control of his vehicle. I was in complete control of mine, and I swerved off the road.
Now, thankfully, we were travelling a road which, in spots, has a tremendously well graded gravel shoulder. I was able to maintain control of the vehicle and return to normal travel on the road.
But in that three or four seconds, so many things could’ve gone wrong. I wasn’t sure about the state of the shoulder — if I’d stayed in my lane, it would’ve been a really bad accident. The act of hitting the shoulder could’ve caused a loss of control worse than that accident, if it had gone just right. There were any number of circumstances in which things ended poorly.
Thankfully, they didn’t. I continued on up the windy road until it became unwindy, and I pulled over and caught my breath. Or thought about throwing up, or shook, or maybe all three. I’m thankful that it didn’t go worse, but also… good heavens, experiencing that kind of fear is not fun.
Football
I think I’ve told this story in a blog post before, but since few of you read this, and you like me enough to listen to me tell a story I love multiple times,
I didn’t watch much football at all until we moved to Puerto Rico. I knew my Papa watched football and like the Green Bay Packers and the Miami Dolphins. And then we moved. We had cable, we had a sega genesis, and I was homesick.
I particularly missed snow.
And one cloudy Sunday afternoon, I was flipping channels. The Green Bay Packers were playing, and it was snowing. It was a cloudy, cool-for-Puerto-Rico afternoon. I dropped the blinds to make the room a little darker, and watched the snow fall.
There was a game happening, too, but for me it was all about the snow falling. And for a few minutes, it felt like maybe, just maybe, if I imagined hard enough, it would really be snowing outside. It was awesome.
And that, dear friends, is how I started watching football. I met a girl later who really like the West Virginia Mountaineers, and I started to understand some of the rules. You know, so I could impress her. But the true origin of my love for football was creating an environment in my living room where I could pretend for just a moment that it was snowing outside.