Thanks Asus, and other useless junk. Politics. Really high-dome achivers. People DO vote against their own interests..or not understand them, or something.

Okay, I have mt rwo Nexus 7 tablets. One of them is absolutely trouble-free. The other one has--I would bet--a power button connection issue. What a crime. I got it for a friend and after much fruitless troubleshooting, have an RMA and new refurb. on the way. My thinking about buying refurbisehed technology devices is that the manufacturer actually goes through and checks things out which does not necessarily happen on an assembly line. This level of frugality has failed me only one other time, and that was when I spent 10USD on a fairly decent mp3 player. Again, I bought two, and one failed within hours of use. I did get a refund on the device, and I was told to keep, donate, destroy, or perform anything alse as I saw fit. I ended up taking it apart and desoldering the Ni-Cad AAA battery and replacing it with a NiMH AAA battery and a micro spade and blade connection. I have now had that little Sandisk player for well over five years.

I would have cracked the Nexus open but the RMA seemed the obvious route. I can solder SMDs to a small degree, but why when a replacement is but two days away. The company--an Amazon affiliate--did all the right things by pre-shipping me a new one while the other one is enroute back to them.

I do not know how Asus handles(mis-handles?) their refurb. program, but if the replacement unit is good, then we will all be friends again.

Once the warranty period is up on these things, I will have a go at the PCB if need be.

The mid-term elections...

What can one say? I know what can almost certainly be said and that is this: science and reason are the big losers here.

Here in NH, things went much better than nationally, but when you vote against something rather than for something, the seeds you sow aren't likely to grow into the plants you expect.

I voted for incumbents because once you deflate all the hyperbole, you may buy Tide or Downy, they are still owned by Proctor & Gamble. Why don't really brilliant people ever run for office? Surely since Jefferson we have had presidential polymaths, but there is precious little evidence to support such a notion.

No, I am not thinking that obvious geniuses like Stephen Wolfram run for office. Feynman, on the other hand, would have made a terrific candidate to watch, but he was too busy having fun NOT at other people's expense to have fun at other people's expense. It is pretty widely acknowledged the S. Wolfram has among the highest tested IQs of any living person..if not the highest. Because intelligence is very widely scattered throughout humanity, it is not uncertain that there are people that have never had a chance to even enter school at all that may have more raw brainpower than guys like Wolfram. I have a huge fascination with people of this intellectual power. Newton always fascinated me as he would perform thought experiments, physically carry the experiments out, devise new maths to quantify his results, and move on to something else that no one had ever thought of as even being an issue to be unlocked by the human mind.

This blog needs a focus. I need to construct better sentences. I am still achy and whiny from yesterday's soil toiling. I am going to drop in perhaps as 300 more bulbs tomorrow. Then I will something to whinge on about.