Today marks the 95th anniversary of the end of World War I, the Great War, the War to End All Wars.
In Flander’s Fields
In Flanders fields the poppies blow Between the crosses, row on row That mark our place; and in the sky The larks, still bravely singing, fly Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, Loved and were loved, and now we lie In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe: To you from failing hands we throw The torch; be yours to hold it high. If ye break faith with us who die We shall not sleep, though poppies grow In Flanders fields.
Recovery from the wisdom teeth extraction has been going much better than expected with much less pain, discomfort and swelling than I expected. So far the only problem I’ve had is a bit of swelling along my lower right jaw where the tooth that was removed in pieces was.
Diet still consists mainly of soups and soft foods. May be ready to move on to more solid foods in another day or two I think. The hard part has been trying to keep stuff from getting stuck where the wisdom teeth used to be.
Took me a little bit longer to get to than I planned, but I finally got the capacitors replaced. The diameter of the 820 μF capacitors were a little larger than the original ones, so it was a bit of a tight fit getting the three of them in. While I was in there, I replaced two other 820 μF capacitors in the middle of the board even though they still looked in good shape. Thought about replacing the 22 μF and 47 μF capacitors, but decided not to. There were a lot of surface mount components near the 22 μF cap and I didn’t want to get the soldering iron too close or accidentally solder where I shouldn’t.
Took me a bit of time to remember how everything went back together, but I got the monitor reassembled and brought it back to the computer. Plugged it in, turned it on and was rewarded with the monitor telling me it was trying to find a signal source. Reconfigured the computer for a second display and up it came!
Monitor is fixed and now I’m back to a dual headed system.
Content warning: The squeamish among you may not want to click through the links in this post.
Wisdom teeth extraction seems to have gone pretty well. The dentist put an IV into one of the veins in the back of my hand, and after giving me whatever he used to put me under, I don’t remember anything until waking up. Wasn’t feeling as groggy as I thought I would be, more like the kind of woozy and slight disorientation you get after being woken up from a deep nap. I’m told that I was talking (or rather mumbling) during the procedure though, and that at one point I even tried to scratch an itch. I really don’t remember anything at all.
Mouth was all kinds of numb, and 6 hours later, it still is. Dentist said it would probably stay that way for most of the day. Probably a good thing.
3 of the wisdom teeth were extracted intact, but the 4th one had to be removed in pieces and isn’t complete.
Here are links to pictures of my teeth. I think they’re pretty neat to look at. They have a fair bit of plaque and tartar build up on them. I imagine being so far back in the mouth, they’re hard to clean properly, and getting them with a tooth brush isn’t always that easy.
I had the fortune of acquiring a veritable gold mine of electrical components tonight. 5 parts bins worth of resistors, capacitors, transistors, switches, ICs and other miscellaneous parts. Most everything is pretty organized so there’s really no sorting that needs to be done. Most of the components were pretty easily identifiable, but there were others that I had never seen before and have no idea what they do.
A lot of items are pretty old, but have never been used. One whole parts bin is just resistors, containing regular carbon film resistors, a few big power resistors and some carbon composition resistors, which you don’t see a whole lot of these days.
The next bin contains transistors and a few other miscellaneous parts. Some of the are unidentifiable other than their form factor and others have never been used.
The third bin is kind of a mish-mash of parts – pre-wound coils, resistors, things that looked like variable capacitors. Quite a few components in this bin that I have never seen before.
The capacitors bin contains some interesting capacitors. Lots of electrolytic caps, and some really big caps in the mF range that I guess could be used for power filtering.
The fifth bin contained all sorts of ICs and EEPROMS. I’m not sure how much of what’s in here will be useful, but I’ll need to try to identify them first. There are even a bunch of Z80 CPU chips in here. I wonder if I could do anything with them.
