Vigor

Date: 2002-01-30 16:38:43

Tuesday afternoon I headed off in search of my Visors which had been shipped to me and were therefore wandering around campus somewhere. The seller of the eBay Visor decided he wanted to ship Airborne Express, so my package ended up in the copy postal center. I had no real idea where exactly the copy postal center was, but I managed to locate it on the ground floor of the ad building. I signed for my package and headed back to my quarters. I ran into my RA and convinced him that he needed to open the mail room for me and retrieve my package. I signed for my reconditioned Visor Deluxe from Handspring and headed back to my room to open my boxes. A quick survey of the eBay unit revealed that the LCD was functioning, but the glass was broken. I attempted to hotsync it to Jared's profile, but it died in the same place he was having his units die at. That killed the eBay unit for a while. I restored my data to the refurbished blue unit and spent the next hour entering things I'll have to do for class for the rest of the quarter, and the backing up again, just for good measure. It was great to have a functioning unit again.

Said unit was functioning perfectly until I headed to my local dorm restroom this afternoon. When I was done, I set my unit on the toilet paper holder, which normally has plenty of surface area on top. I stood up and nudged it and the toilet paper holder knocked itself off one of its supporting bolts and hung at such an angle that my Visor (the reconditioned blue one) slid off and fell a meter to the tile floor. I remember from engineering mechanics that the velocity v of an object that falls distance h with an acceleration to gravity g is:

So my reconditioned blue Visor Deluxe impacted the tile floor face-down at 4.429 meters per second, imparting 1.5 Joules into the screen of my poor unit.

I had another Visor in my possession with a broken screen. Wonderful.

(At this point, I shall officially make several time-saving definitions. Blue shall refer to the reconditioned blue unit I acquired from Handspring. eBay shall refer to the ice unit with the broken screen I acquired on a popular Internet auction site. Geordi shall refer to my original unit, which started this whole fiasco by deciding to stop working in church in Boulder on 05 January 2002.)

I returned to my quarters and double-checked my new unit's warranty. It was reconditioned, so I don't have the option of acquiring extra coverage that includes things like screen replacement. I sighed and swapped Blue's broken screen with Geordi's screen, which I believed was mostly functional from plugging it into Jared's unit (which, to my knowledge, is unnamed). Apparently I managed to damage the LCD while playing with it outside anything vaguely resembling a protective case, because a wide swath of pixels in the middle of the screen refused to turn on. This obviously wasn't good. I examined the screens in greater detail and discovered that they were comprised of a thin, transparent touch-sensitive layer on top of a three millimeter piece of glass on top of an LCD. Both of the LCDs on the broken screens were functioning, having broken only the glass layer, rendering the touch-sensitive layer unresponsive. I chipped the broken glass out of eBay's screen and verified that the LCD was functioning and that the touch-sensitive region was gone. I performed another Frankenvisor-class experiment and plugged Geordi's touch-sensitive layer into eBay's screen into Blue's backplane. It worked, but was rather useless: I couldn't see what it was that I was trying to tap until I tapped, since I was tapping on a completely different screen.

Although useless, the experiment gave me an idea: if the glass and touch-sensitive layer could be peeled off Geordi's screen and placed on eBay's screen, I might have a fully-functional screen. I was dubious about the feasibility of the operation, especially my ability to perform it. I carefully pried at the edges and the entire glass piece, complete with the touch-sensitive layer, cleaved away from the LCD. I carefully placed the glass piece on eBay's LCD and was quite pleased and rather shocked when it worked on Blue's backplane. I plugged the working unit back together, which I have officially dubbed Vigor. It's rather nice to have a fully-functional Visor again (again), and I think extended warranty plans are a Rather Good Idea (tm) when one is dealing with expensive and fragile personal electronics.