Legwork and Life, week of 1/30/19

This is Legwork and Life, where I track the legwork and opportunities in my career as an autistic advocate, and also describe parts of my adult autistic life, including my perspectives on everyday problems and situations.

Wellp.  This week included getting snowed into my house, and also taking apart my work/home computer in order to find out why it wasn't starting up.  So it was, um, slightly more interesting than I prefer.  I also got my hair re-dyed and attended a lecture on Gender, Sex, and Sexuality.  

The lecture was a very basic sort, but as it was held at a church, I showed up to both give support and make sure they didn't, um... teach something regrettable, shall we say.  But they had it right: the basic message of the Bible is love.  Regardless of whether you understand or have anything in common with any given person, the Bible calls us to love them.  So the rest of the talk was basically explaining the terminology and spectrums involved in these discussions.  I did a piece on some of this back in 2016.  

The weather in my state finally remembered what latitude it's located at, and has proceeded to snow properly for the first time this winter.  By properly, I mean "there's over a foot of snow on the ground and it's still snowing hard."  This would be excessive for many places I've lived, but not this one.  Fortunately, my spouse pretty much stayed home during the worst of it, and my job doesn't involve leaving the house at regular intervals.  

And a good thing, too, because the road basically looks like this, too.  

It does involve having a working computer, though!  So when my computer broke, I was understandably kind of upset.  I don't just use my home computer for work, either.  It's also my main source of leisure activities, particularly while the weather is cold and gross.  The day it broke, last Friday, was the day I was scheduled to play group content in my online video game with my spouse and like 14 other people.  Everyone's needed, so not being there would have been troublesome.  

Now, I took a PC Repair class in high school, the very first year it was offered.  So I have a bit more background in this sort of thing than I would have otherwise.  It also happens that my spouse has some background in that area as well.  So I ended up finding a grounding mat and opening my computer case.  (You never want to tinker with the insides of a computer without making sure you don't have static electricity on you.  You can destroy computer parts like that, so you normally use a grounding strap.)

I was fortunate in this particular case: the malfunction my computer was experiencing was such that I was simply able to unplug and examine computer parts until I found the malfunctioning one.  I started with the RAM, as that's often the first thing to break in a computer anyway.  But pulling out first one, then the other, then both sticks at the same time, did nothing to help the situation.  So that wasn't it.  

Next I ruled out the hard drives, disconnecting them one at a time.  It changed nothing, unsurprisingly.  The point at which the computer failed in startup shouldn't have been accessing them anyway, but it was good to know for sure that they were clearly not the issue.  The computer had sufficient power, so the power supply wasn't the issue either.  After that, I disconnected the graphics card and rerouted my computer screen through the motherboard... which still didn't solve the problem.  

That unfortunately left two hard-to-test parts: the motherboard and the CPU.  The CPU, at least, I could look at to see if maybe something was visibly off about it... so I did, and found this: 

See the pretty patterning?  That is definitely not supposed to be there.

So it turns out the thermal paste, which helps transfer the heat off the CPU so it doesn't overheat and start melting your computer, was partially dried out.  The computer was refusing to start past a certain point so it wouldn't start melting itself.  Using some of my spouse's computer repair supplies, I was able to clean off the CPU and its components and reapply fresh thermal paste, then put everything back together.  The computer worked, and in time for me to get some work done and attend that group event in my computer game, too.  

I kind of wish more problems in life could be solved by simply removing and inspecting parts until you find the broken bit.  But you can't do that so quickly and easily in, say, a malfunctioning group setting.  My graphics card, in my computer, has no ego and no feelings and therefore does not care if I circumvent it to check if it's the cause of the malfunction.  

But if my graphics card were a human being, it would probably have choice words to say about my decision to remove it from the computer.  Perhaps it would point fingers at the RAM, or have Opinions about the power supply's performance.  Maybe it would even refuse to leave the computer, thus hindering the diagnostic process.  Maybe all the computer parts would have a hierarchy, and some parts would feel left out.  

People are so messy and complicated.  For all the time I spent in high school and college studying psychology and trying to figure them out, I'm very grateful that some problems in life don't involve people.  It's nice to just take logical step after logical step, and solve a problem without having to make those calculations.