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retreating into the calendar
Friday, April 10 2009
setting: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, New York
The Brother HL-2140 laser printer wasn't printing, so there I was trying to figure out why. One can put tape over the sensors that inaccurately determine toner levels and force premature cartridge purchases (and much landfill burial of perfectly good and paid-for toner), but this didn't seem to be working. I had a cartridge for the old Brother laser printer that conveniently (for Brother) doesn't fit this one, so I tried opening it up and dumping the toner powder from one to the other. It was a little like loading a vintage black powder rifle, and it was such an obviously messy process that I did it outside. I also used a plastic funnel to help reduce spillage. In the end, the cartridge was loaded and could print, but it couldn't do so neatly. I could wipe the rollers off and maybe get a single sheet of acceptable printage (suitable, at least, for faxing, which was the need that had led me to this printer), but then little clumps of toner would find their way onto the rollers and leave repeated smudgy patterns in black down the page. For Brother this is a feature and not a bug, and their solution would be for me to buy a new Brother-approved cartridge from Staples, but instead I bought a recycled cartridge from a third party online.
Meanwhile I was trying to get the laptop of a "popup client" (one who pops up only once every six months, and then only when I'm extremely busy) to boot from something other than its hard drive, but I was having no luck. I've been sort of out of the loop in the computer hardware world and was a little surprised to find that even laptops are using Serial ATA these days. This makes it a lot easier to hook their drives up to desktops, which (unlike in the old days of parallel ATA) have Serial ATA ports that are identical to those of laptops.
While I'd been out in the driveway pouring black powder from one cartridge to the other, dark clouds had gathered and winds started blowing. Eventually there was rain and temperatures started retreating into the calendar backwards a couple crucial weeks.
Meanwhile Deborah had come by and was giving Gretchen a massage that would last two whole hours. Gretchen's coccyx has been bothering her and the pain has been climbing the ladder that is her spinal column, forcing her to walk about with a strange posture: her ass pushed out and her upper back held vertically.
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http://asecular.com/blog.php?090410 feedback
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