Friday, January 28, 2011

$41.71


Hi and a Happy Aloha Friday. You've probably never experienced something like this yourself, but with a click of a mouse, and a fistful of dollars, I bought a soldering gun online last night. From Amazon. Weller® brand. The industry standard for soldering guns. For an unbelievable $41.71. *Plus, free shipping*. Scheduled to arrive in the mail next week. But, know something, with "free shipping," I wouldn't mind waiting 2-weeks for the item. If it was urgent, I'd dish out another $40 and buy the same unit for its $80 retail price at local stores. Btw, those shipping charges on Internet "deals"....are often questionable. Free shipping eliminates that scenario. The $41.71 price was for the kit. Which means you get a carrying case and assorted soldering tips and a spool of solder wire (photo below) along with the soldering gun. The Weller soldering gun, "professional model," has a two-position trigger. 200 watts and 260 watts. It should suffice for the kind of soldering work I'll be doing around here for the next 50 years.

Saturday, January 22, 2011

Happy 2011


Ladies and gentlemen, dignitaries, distinguished guests, and all five regular readers of my illustrious blog....the staff and management of Hotel Waikiki is pleased to announce that we are reopened for business as of today. The power supply unit in my computer, the battleship gray metal box that you see in the photo above, gave out last month. In itself, it was not a world shattering event by any measure. Just a shrug the shoulders, slap the forehead, kind of thing. In fact, being that the computer decided to malfunction during the holiday season, I simply thought, "just buy a new computer." Usually there's a lot of great deals out there for electronic equipment during the holiday season so the timing couldn't have been better in that sense or cents. However, with only about Best Buy and Office Depot remaining in Honolulu, the selection of computers on display was very limited and whatever computers were there, their brick-n-motar prices weren't discounted. I even asked a salesman at Best Buy, "How much is the $700 computer without the monitor and keyboards, etc.?" and the salesman replied back to me rather matter-of-factly, "$700 is the price for just the computer tower alone." Or, didn't you know that? No, I wasn't aware. Then, go hitch up your raindeers to your sled and shop at some other store. That is to say he musta recognized me as Santa Claus without the suit.


Moving on....there is a benefit of not being able to connect online, I don't use my computer for too much more other than that, is that I had a windfall of extra time on my hands during which I accomplished so much more than had I instead spent the 2-hours to 24-hours of the same day immersed on the Internet. I wasn't 100-percent sure that the culprit was the power supply. There are a multitude of internal components that could be causing the computer to go on strike and if you replaced every single part in a hit or miss fashion, eventually somewhere around the year 2020, it'll have cost more than buying a new computer at the conclusion of the project. Still after fiddling around with the computer, I decided it'll be worthwhile to replace the "metal box" and if the replacement did indeed restore life back to the computer, things would be a heck of a lot cheaper than buying a brand new computer, or in the event that the replacement part didn't fix things, I could add another souvenir to my extensive collection. Unfortunately, the manufacturer no longer stocked the specific power supply and from all the wiring and plugs routed out from the power supply box, itself, I had the misimpression that the power supply unit had to be an original equipment manufacturer part that fit to a tee. It wasn't. Since, I had been so productive during the month of not having a working computer at my disposal, the thought did enter my mind that perhaps I should unplug myself from the World Wide Web on a permanent basis. At the very most, reading Email. I don't write diary stuff on my blog, so it's not as if looking back years from now, I'd be depriving myself of reveling in the details in an important chapter of my life or anything of that nature as with a diarist genre. That said, see you again in a few days.




*Btw, my blog's banner is out of focus. Working on that, darn.