Notes from Maine - 2023/01/22
Here in the Northern Hemisphere, the days are getting longer. Can you sense it? Have you been enjoying those extra few minutes of sunlight? Snow came again yesterday, covering up all the frozen mud. Albert (German Shepherd) is much better at finding frisbees this year than last—maybe that’s just because we only have 4 inches out there. The first storm last year dumped about a foot and he would dig and circle endlessly before he found his prey.
Finn (Mastiff - knee surgery) is allowed on the deck too. There are a few stairs that he can practice on to build strength. I was just reading my notes from right after his surgery. Back then, my guess was that his hair would grow back by the time his movement was unrestricted. I was wrong. He still has noticeably less hair on his left hip compared to his right. I bet he will look normal again by April.
The other day, I built a PC. My nephew wanted to build one, so we consulted on the phone and bought all the same parts. With mine all built, I made him a list of the steps so he wouldn’t make the same mistakes I did. It’s not too complicated, but with a custom machine there are delicate processes and it helps to know precisely what order to do them in. The M.2 Expansion slot for the SSD is right under the CPU’s cooling stack, for example. That’s something I didn’t know before I had already spread the thermal paste.
Ugh—these are all details that I kinda wish I didn’t know.
I left PCs behind more than a decade ago, and for good reason. One’s brain can become cluttered with these nonsense tidbits. I would rather simply hit a button and have no idea what’s at the end of those wires. But I can understand why he wanted to build from parts rather than buy something off the shelf. The parts weren’t cheap, but they would have cost a lot more if we had shopped for pre-assembled machines. And he’ll be able to upgrade (maybe) individual components in the future. It’s certainly an interesting educational opportunity.
He’s currently trying to find a way to get the fan plugged in. We were on the phone for about five hours yesterday, and we’re coming up on three hours today. It’s more fun than it sounds. There’s not much for me to do except listen, visualize, answer questions, and try to offer helpful suggestions. My version of helpful ends up being pretty sarcastic, but not in a mocking way—as least I hope it doesn’t come off as mocking. My nephew is already pretty sarcastic himself and habitually exaggerates.
“There are literally 10,000 screws in this bag,” he says.
I say, “Wow. Well, mine only came with two-dozen screws. I wonder if there was come mixup at the factory?”
“No,” he says, “I didn’t mean actually. There’s just a lot.”
“Ah…” I say.
Nikola Tesla imagined delivering power wirelessly, with lightning bolts zapping power through the air to receivers instead of running miles of cables. Maybe if computers were designed that way, my nephew’s machine would already be working. One of the fans is plugged in. His father is trying to get the other one done. On my headset, I have a front-row seat for the audio version of man versus machine.
I don’t have the heart to tell him how difficult the next step is.
He’ll find out soon enough.
I just hung up so I can “go do chores.” That’s my code phrase for taking a break.
“There’s literally nowhere to plug in this connector.”
“Huh. That’s odd. The back of my power supply had these two stacked connectors where I…”
“Oh. I see it.”
This has gone on for four hours today at this point. He is extremely persistent when he’s working on something he wants to do. As part of my “chores,” I took the dogs out back so Albert could chase the frisbee and Finn could practice on the stairs. It was nice to see the last of the sunlight.
I just heard him yell, “Mom! Can you come push this cable in for me?”
That made me smile.
We’re nearing the home stretch as far as hardware goes. The next part—actually loading Windows—was really frustrating for me. I had to dive deep into strange websites for advice on repartitioning and copying install files onto a dummy partition, blah, blah, blah.
He just finished. It literally took him a nanosecond to install Windows, and then OneDrive “attacked” him with millions of files. He’ll figure that out. Windows is his domain.
That experience was a lot of fun, actually. There were frustrating moments, but we got through them and everything worked the first time he plugged it in. I wonder if his heart swelled with pride as all those fancy lights came on and the fans started turning. I know mine did.
