Two Wheels to Hell: Part 2

See PART I HERE

PART II

I'm going to wrap this story up. This journey had almost nothing to do with scenery or people so look elsewhere for those details. It was a test of endurance and my will power to meet the wind head on. The landscape was irrelevant.

I remember lighting fires; I remember sitting by 'em;
  I remember seeing faces, hearing voices, through the smoke;
I remember they were fancy -- for I threw a stone to try 'em.
  "Something lost behind the Ranges" was the only word they spoke.

- Kipling. "The Explorer"

The madness was only beginning. I remained in St. Paul for a week or two, always thinking about the winter approaching Wyoming and the Sierras. I slowly recovered use of my arms and legs. The soreness and lack of agility would take 5 years to recover from but in the two weeks off the bike I managed to walk, to support my weight with my arms, to open and close my fists. A doctor would've told me that I had narrowly avoided permanent joint damage. "You're lucky to be alive," he'd probably say. But I didn't see a doctor and considered my partial recovery a sign that I would indeed arrive at my destination before winter.  No sooner had I regained the ability to walk I returned to the road. My friend had been unable to convince me to postpone the journey until I fully recovered. I wanted to prove to the wind that I could take the worst it could dish out. The rain never stopped but I had washed my clothes. Dried out my gear. I've seen other bike touring rigs and most weigh less than mine, but not by much. I had 75 pounds but most of that weight was water.

Two Wheels To Hell: Part 1

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Perspective

Google Maps allows one to zoom out so far that you can see your relationship to the sun and the Milky Way. We're not alone in the universe, but for practical purposes we are indeed alone. Developed from pure random and inexplicable circumstances.

Wolf Quest Part XII

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Key Problems

I don't know what it is with me and broken computer keyboards but this is the second one that has failed me and required emergency repair so I can continue to expose my emotionally traumatic past.

I really suspected it was the power wire.

I don't abuse this keyboard at all although if it had eyes I'm sure it would be in therapy. Maybe it's trying to kill itself so it doesn't have to watch me torture myself anymore. I don't know. I'm not a doctor. But it was connecting and disconnecting randomly and I dreaded a BIOS update and all the keyboards in Latin America are not the same so I would have trouble I don't want. Spanish keyboards have bizarre symbols and if I told you want I have to do to make the @ symbol on a Spanish Keyboard you would laugh in my face. It requires two people. And simply making " quotation marks involves three different key shortcuts, and then the quotation marks do not appear until you type a letter. There are upside down question marks that begin a question. Ctrl+A doesn't do shit to select all the text. No. And Ctrl+T (todos) also doesn't do shit.  a comma is where the period normally is. In short, I had to fix this fucking keyboard that I bought in a pawn store in Maine many moons ago. I manipulated the cable and it seemed that either the software was dropping the keyboard exactly when I twisted the cable or else the cable had broken inside the housing, which has never happened to my keyboard before. This was a trip down memory lane into shielded cable, ground wires, data, power, neutral, strain relief, dsub pins, engineer drawing, sweating vodka while I fucked up a semi-conductor cable harness. God, the awful things I've done to survive. Bunch of bullshit but it helped me avoid buying a new keyboard and learning the Latin American layout.

That plastic block is called a strain relief and you can see how well it worked because only one wire broke.

Well, I took the keyboard to an internet shop where I print out my Flintstones Theme Jazz charts and plugged it in and it didn't work there either. Then I tug on the wires and the red one pulls right out. So that's a clue. And it broke right next to the strain relief and for a week or two it was hanging on by a thread and if I held the keyboard perfectly it would power up, but that thread broke finally and would only reconnect when I twisted the wires. Even though it's like .7mA of current the red power wire does succumb to heat over time and also the strain of repeatedly typing "Cheerleader Porn" could have been too much to tolerate. I feel bad for the keyboard, but the world is full of grief these days and we all have to deal with bullshit.

Don't cut the shield or the ground wire that surround the main wires. Split the shield in half and then pull the metallic-wrapped 4 wires out. Take the wrapping off and check for continuity. Cutting the ground wires won't kill the power but it will allow a short to ground to kill your computer.

The lesson is that things can be fixed but at this point it doesn't matter if you buy another brand new keyboard.