Kevin Standlee (kevin_standlee) wrote,
Kevin Standlee
kevin_standlee

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Of Broken Computers, Cars, and Travel Trailers

We drove up to the computer-repair shop in Beaverton, which claimed that the memory slot was bad because we broke it by opening the memory slot door without removing the battery first.

I can't disprove this, but it seems highly unlikely that if I'd possibly done something that would have shorted out the slot, the memory chips themselves would still work. And it's not like I'm incompetent. Changing memory chips is not something you need to be a Highly Trained Professional to do. After some discussion, the manager agreed to go ahead and change out the motherboard, although he made it sound like it was a large concession on his part and that a ham-handed amateur like me obviously doesn't know what he's doing and we should have tested everything before we left their shop. Well, the last is sort of true, but if we have to test that, then does that mean we have to test every single component as well?

The really bad part here is that Lisa is so disheartened by this that she says that when it's ready, she doesn't want it, even though the money is already spent and can't be recovered. I suppose we could put it up on eBay and maybe get back part of what we spent. Lisa doesn't handle adversity very well.

Speaking of adversity, before we headed out this morning, I went to the back door of my van to put the computer and other things in and it wouldn't open. From the loose feel in my hand, I think a piece of metal inside the door latch has broken off. You can't open it from the inside, either -- there is no inside latch because the space behind the rear seat isn't a passenger compartment and is considered simlar to the trunk of a car. So now we can't open the rear door, although we can get at that space by way of the rear seat. To repair it will require removing panels from the inside of the rear door and replacing the mechanism.

Certainly worse things could have broken. As far as operating out on the road, the van is running beautifully. The cruise control refused to work for a while this morning, but came back to life later, which was something of a relief, because I'm doing a lot of open-road driving this weekend.

After returning from Beaverton, we got Lisa's things out and I finished packing for the trip back to California. Lisa gassed up her big van and we traveled in convoy to Springfield, south of Eugene, to an RV salvage yard. Much to our surprise, they ended up having none of the fairly common door latches that we needed. This is unfortunate, because none of the modern replacements for the ten-year-old part are quite the same, even the US made ones. Then Lisa and I said our goodbyes and she headed north and I south on I-5.

I made pretty good time by my standards (about 330 miles in about seven hours including several short and a couple long stops), so while I'd ended up leaving Mehama around an hour later than I'd originally planned, I got to Weed by 8:30 and settled in to the hotel.

The Holiday Inn Express Weed is small, only two stories, and probably for that reason has no elevator, but I can lug my bags up a single flight of stairs. It has much better internet connection than Ashland did last weekend. I had time to eat dinner and go for a short soak in the hot tub before turning in. What with losing an hour tonight, I wanted to get to bed relatively early, but that was not to be. Fortunately I do have all day tomorrow to make it the remaining 300 or so miles home, after having driven (including the trip to Beaverton) driven close to 500 miles today.

Edit, 11 March 21:30: Travel report on today's trip: Left Mehama at 13:25, arrived Weed 20:25, having traveled 331 miles in 7 hours for a 47 MPH average, including six stops.
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