Unlike the Midwest and East Coast where the ragweed pollen season is just starting, by September the main pollen seasons for Whatcom County are over. Pockets of moderate weed pollen counts exist, but for the most part it's all over but the shouting for allergy suffers in the Pacific Northwest.
Someone needs to explain that to my allergies.
Most cases of hay fever, or allergic rhinitis, are caused by an allergy to fall pollen from plants belonging to the genus Ambrosia, more commonly known as ragweed. Ragweed is a flowering plant from the sunflower family, also known as bitterweeds or bloodweeds. The scientific name of this genus is sometimes claimed to be derived from 
the Ancient Greek term for the perfumed nourishment of the Greek gods, often depicted as conferring ageless immortality upon whoever consumes it. How ironic that would be, since the genus is best known for severe and widespread allergies. They share the common etymological origin name, both being derived from ambrotos, which means "immortal". In the case of the plants, they are tenacious and hard to get rid of when they occur.
My body’s immune system mounted a vigorous response to the tiny grains of pollen released by maturing ragweed flowers, reacting to them as if they were a threat, a cascade of biochemical reactions flooding the bloodstream with histamine which causes the all-too-familiar allergy symptoms. The result: red, puffy eyes, watery and itchy, red and bloodshot. Not a pretty sight.
Autumn is a time for reflection about the great warm season that has passed. As with the seasons, and like all things, the ragweed allergy too shall pass.
The end of the trilogy. Each week you've had that annoying "wanting more" feeling at the conclusion of the post. Your hero was tested again and again times with new challenges; the narratives and themes were enduring, or at least I thought so.
Trilogies are the sign of a serious reader. Now it draws to a close, and I promise a happy ending.
Twelve hours after the last post, there I sat, watching and waiting. The hard drive light barely flickering, hopeful yet resigned to the fact 
that is was a lost cause. In this case, recovering the drive would not be an exercise in convenience; nothing, and I mean nothing, was duplicated elsewhere. MP3s ripped from CDs, iTunes downloads, pictures...it was all there locked in the non-responsive drive.
I did what any hard working family IT support person that was lacking sleep would do: I took it to Best Buy.
They poked and prodded, looking for signs of life. The first guy disappeared, replaced by a second, and then a third. The decision was hard drive failure. A new hard drive, data recovery and their magic to make it happen was pretty darn close to $400. Holy moley. The laptop was in plain view the entire time and there wasn't one bit of real diagnosis that went on.
Now armed with a dislike for geeks in ties, the laptop and I went home. Little did they know who they were dealing with. They even provided a clue as to what may have caused the problem: perhaps Windows choked on the last update it never completed running. A sense of renewal came over me, and I was ready to tackle it again. Out came the hard drive; when I slaved it to my desktop it ran fine. I copied the necessary files from it, and popped it back in the laptop. Time for recovery mode. Follow the instructions, click this, tab that and don't forget that ALL DATA WILL BE ERASED ON YOUR HARD DRIVE IF YOU PROCEED.
Jeez...was all caps really necessary?
A scant thirty minutes later the laptop was running like it was 2009 and fresh out of the box. It took another four hours to download every Windows update necessary to bring everything up to date.
It's been said that binary logic will always be inferior to human intuitive ability. I reaffirmed this, triumphant over the machine that tormented, troubled and distressed me. The story has been told to the end; the trilogy is finished.
It's been seven days since the last time I tried to repair my daughter's laptop. The new screen assembly arrived Friday in the mail, so after dinner we tempted fate once again and waded into the uncharted waters of gutting a laptop.
Two hours later, we had assembled, dis-assembled, re-assembled, dis-assembled and finally re-assembled one lats time. By the final assembly we were pretty darn good at it, but I have no intention of trading in my day job for laptop work.
The screen? It works great. Brilliant colors, crisp features, everything you could ask for in a display.
The computer? It vexes me. After starting up normally and working for a full ten minutes, it decided the mouse wasn't needed and turned it off. Thirty minutes of fooling around later and the shutdown option was available and selected.
Hmmm...now what? Waiting for it to turn off on it's own burned through another 30 minutes. The all-powerful and all-kn
owing Internet suggested many options. "Boot to BIOS Diagnostics (F10) and run memory and hard drive diagnostic tests", it said. Fun times, but no progress. "Run Last Known Good Configuration (Advanced)". Oh yeah, that was helpful. "Boot to Windows Advanced boot options (F8) and Run Repair Your Computer". It started after that, but most applications wouldn't run.
So many choices. All take time to run through and try. Start up, make a choice, wait untold minutes, try to shut down, wait untold minutes, pull the plug and throw the blasted machine into the street, running it over repeatedly with my car. Sorry, musta dozed off there for a minute. It was a nice dream.
Start up, wait. Shut down, wait. Start up, wait. Shut down, wait. Watching the screen and waiting for a sign of life.
Liquid crystal displays (LCDs) do not produce light themselves (unlike, for example Cathode ray tube displays). They need illumination to produce a visible image, and a backlight can illuminate the LCD from the side or back of the display panel. Many LCDs use a cold cathode fluorescent lamp (CCFL) as a backlight.
When the backlight on your LCD screen goes out, you're left in the dark. It's not impossible to read your screen, but it ain't fun, that's for 
sure. Laura's laptop checked its internal clock, and, realizing the warranty had just run out, decided it was time for the backlight to go out.
I had two options. I could send it off for repairs, but I'm, um, frugal, and always worried about getting the short end of the, um, deal, on something like this. That left fixing it myself. Hmmm...pay someone to correctly repair it, or pry it apart and carefully remove who knows how many parts just to get to the display, then remove the LCD screen, detaching it from the body itself, removing brackets and cables and whatever else is in there.
The choice was obvious. I ordered a bulb and waited patiently for it to show up in the mail.
When the bulb arrived, Laura and I sat down, armed with various tools and several web-sites of how to accomplish our task. Two hours later we had it completely apart, wires everywhere, parts strewn across the dining room table. We managed to get past clips that did not want to open, metal tape never designed to be removed and at least one sticker that said DANGER: HIGH VOLTAGE. Finally the moment of truth: we peeled the LCD panel apart and removed the bulb. Technically, it is a bulb; physically, it's more like white spaghetti. Try soldering power wires on vermicelli and see how much fun you have.
The wires went on, but the ends stuck out, so naturally I tried to trim them to fit the frame for the bulb. Just a hair shorter and it would work. One more clip and...
Later that evening, Laura summed it up succinctly: the surgery was not successful. I broke the spaghetti bulb. Crap.
Fortunately the patient is in a kind of stasis and can wait for other parts to arrive. Hey, I can't take it to a repair shop now.. they'll charge me double! This time we'll go what should be the easier route and get the complete screen to place in the display panel, which comes with the bulb already in them. Wish us luck.
the Ancient Greek term for the perfumed nourishment of the Greek gods, often depicted as conferring ageless immortality upon whoever consumes it. How ironic that would be, since the genus is best known for severe and widespread allergies. They share the common etymological origin name, both being derived from ambrotos, which means "immortal". In the case of the plants, they are tenacious and hard to get rid of when they occur.
