Monthly Archives: August 2007

Lego: Nova Carrier updated

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I have been working on the Nova Carrier 3D Model quite a bit lately, and I have updated the piccies on the website to reflect that. I am learning a lot of stuff I didn’t learn years ago. Nice, high end techie outside-the-box-thinking kind of stuff while doing research into how to best implement this design. I think I am going to stick with my own instincts on most of it, borrowing and incorporating the new techniques into my own style. That way, I will be creating and implementing these techniques on my own instead of just copying someone else’s design.

Much, much more to do, so little time and computer resources to do it with.

Check it out.

My first professional printer repair

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I did my first professional printer repair today.

The short story: laser printer repair is remarkably easy.

The long story: Had an HP LJ1200 at front desk and a LJ1000 in the shop. The 1200′s laser unit died a few weeks ago (according to the local, and very cool, printer shop). We replaced it and kept it around for spare parts. Then, a few days later the 1000 has an electronics problem. Here’s the cool thing: the 1200 and 1000 physical innards are almost identical. The mainboard and formatter board are not, however. (again, thanks printer shop guy!)

So, I called the printer shop guy and asked if the laser unit could be removed from the 1000 and put in the 1200 giving me a new printer. He said YES, and gave me a quick rundown of how to disassemble the units.

I tore down the printers and swapped the laser unit. BLING! Now, we have a working printer for the shop again.

I really should look into doing printer repair for the business. Could be a good thing. Don’t want to hurt the local printer guy though, he’s really cool.

Stress and loathing in the tech shop.

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Oh, what a week from hell this has been. It has been one long stress-fest from day one. Trying to remember everything that happened would be almost impossible, but let me see if I can get the gist of it…

  • Getting interrupted by rush jobs, hoisted upon me by unsuspecting techies who didn’t know I had to be somewhere in 5 minutes.
  • Wrong parts being sent by my vendor, more than once. The returns/swaps pile is now huge.
  • Lightning storms=emergencies!
  • piles upon piles of boxes in the way (too much stuff shipped in, not enough room to put it anywhere!)
  • everyone wanting everything yesterday
  • an extremely long thursday, where I had to get up several hours earlier than normal to spend over half my day an hour away from home working on computer systems for a religious organization that I hate to my very core but had no choice to deal with because my boss belongs to said organization and he “volunteered” me without my consent…. which made me over a half a day behind on an already large pile of work
  • A guy who bought a computer, brought it back in a month later for a minor warranty problem. We fixed the problem and tried at least 8 times to get the computer back to him and he never got the computer. 8 months later we repurposed the machine as a shop workstation. That was 2 years ago. Fast forward to Tuesday. The guy brings in an ancient machine, claims it was the one he purchased, said he never used it since he got it back (but you never got it back dumba**), and wanted us to make sure it still worked. I had to tell him that the computer I was using to sign him into the system at that moment was his original, that he, in his own stupidity never got his computer back and that he can either have back his 3 year old repurposed workstation or I can build him a new computer. UGH! THERE GOES THE PROFIT MARGIN.
  • Techies learning more every day making me look stupid
  • Not having enough company vehicles available to get all our on-site appointments handled
  • about 5 billion people calling me to leave me messages about stupid inane things that any of the other techs could have handled
  • Dealing with future-casting the business. Things like training, moving into new locations, acquiring other companies…

To top it all off: this is a three-pay month. We have to do payroll three times this month, one on the very last day. Its always tough to turn a profit on those months.

This week? Loverly.

Idle time…

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I really haven’t posted anything in a long time. Nothing really new has been happening in the tech world. Lets see:

Windows Vista does not have a repair install in the standard sense. You can do a new installation without formatting the machine, but you will always have to reinstall your applications, and the old program files and user folders are dropped into a folder called windows.old. Teh suck.

The Computer Museum is pretty much done. Just need to take some more pictures and clean it up a bit.

Ideas for SPID are floating through my head, but nothing has really gotten done there.