I gave my laptop some personality

[Big Frank]

I got tired of my boring looking laptop so I gave it some personality. Or at least it looks different now. I always get bubbles when I put stickers on something, so I watched a couple videos on how to apply decals using the wet method. I did the same thing with these stickers and laid them down as smooth as can be. Time will tell if having soapy water between the stickers and computer will cause them not to adhere. If it works, I'm going to plaster the back window of my Yukon with dozens of stickers, mostly pro-2A stuff, and gun company advertising stickers, using the same method.

I have 3 different sizes of Union Sportsmen's Alliance stickers and put the biggest one right in the middle of the lid. And I made sure it's right side up when the screen is open. Then I stuck the I Don't Care Bear sticker on. I have a 4" Velcro patch of that on the toe of my MultiCam Christmas stocking, too. Among all those cutesy Care Bears, there should be one bear that just doesn't care. They should make kids cartoons more realistic if they really want to teach them a valuable life lesson.   Then I added the High-Speed Wireless Device sticker.

Wicked Cutz gave me 2 Bacon Daddy stickers with my order of 50 bags of bacon jerky. Yep, 50 bags. It was $5 Baconmania, so I ordered 10 of the bacon packs of 5 flavors. I'm sure glad no porch pirates stole my $250 box of bacon off the front porch when I was at the doctor Thursday. BACON! I'm beggin' for bacon. After I stuck that on, the next one was FJB, in the style of an international vehicle registration code, like stickers you see on cars in Europe. Germany has D for Deutschland, and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is GB, not UK like you might expect the UK to have. The United States of America is US, Mexico is MEX, Canada is CDN, but it used to be CA. Now people drive around the country with all kinds of stickers on their cars that aren't country codes, like FJB, and I don't think most of them know what the real stickers are for.

I put a Grumpy Old Vet sticker on, just like the one I sent Sarge, and I have one left to put on my car. Then I added the G.I. Joe style Knowing Is Half The Battle sticker from Vet TV on and thought I was done. Then I realized I had stickers that would fit in the narrow space on the right and stuck the M.I. sticker on. I was already unsure if the stickers would peel because of the texture on my laptop. It could allow air and dirt to get in behind the stickers. Then I added another unknown factor by applying them with soapy water and squeegeeing it out. It looks like the plastic squeegee got most of the stickers down in the cracks. And a paper towel over the squeegee did a good job of soaking up the water that was squeezed out. Now when I go up north my friends will see the stickers on the laptop and might think I got rid of the old POS I was always swearing at.   I can make the outside look better, but the inside is still the same old crap.

[Big Frank]

The 4" long G.I. Joe Sticker is still available from Vet TV for $3.95. The more you know.

https://shop.veterantv.com/collections/accessories/products/g-i-joe-sticker

The I Don't Care Bear sticker, patch, T-shirt, V-neck, and tank tops are all available at Grunt Style.

https://www.gruntstyle.com/search?q=i+don%27t+f*cking+care&type=product

[Big Frank]

I think I got something wet that should have stayed dry when I was scrubbing the crud off of my laptop. When I tried signing in I couldn't. The Z, X, C, and V buttons are all dead and I can't enter my password. So I pulled the buttons off, and the parts under the buttons and cleaned that all up but it didn't work. I lost one part of the button support that's like a square hinged at the middle inside another square, but if it wasn't dead, I could still push the little white rubber button in the center. I already had the service manual downloaded and followed the directions for removing the palm-rest and keyboard. You have to remove everything else to get to it, and that's as far as it breaks down. You can't remove the keyboard, but they sell replacement keyboards for less than $20, and not the whole assembly with the palm-rest, so I ordered one. It should be here a week or so after I get back from my 4th of July trip where I planned on watching some movies I saved on the laptop.    I think I can use my soldering iron or something to remove all the plastic studs that have the ends melted and flattened out like rivets holding it together. I don't what's going to hold it together when I put the new keyboard in, but I have lots of Amazing Goop and I'll glue it together with that if I have to. Everyone knows about Murphy's Law. Some people say Murphy was an optimist, and sometimes I agree. Things that can't even go wrong, still go wrong somehow.  

I was going to ask if anyone tried using the wet method of applying stickers before, and if it worked. Now I'm more worried about working on a laptop for the first time in my life. The half with the screen is sitting by itself, and everything else is one big heap of parts, with all the screws in a Ziploc bag so I don't lose them in the coming month. I guess I'll pile it up on my dresser where I kept it when it was all in one piece.

[Big Frank]

I texted this picture to my friend and told him something's wrong with my laptop.   And it looks like I'll have to take the old Windows 7 desktop with whatever movies are on it for movie nights.   It's only for 10 days, or however long he took off for the week of the 4th. But I don't know if my new projector will hook up to it, and since the old computer isn't hooked up, I may not find out. It looks like we'll be watching old movies on his little TV again like before. No Mad Max Furiosa double feature, or Ghostbusters double feature unless I start downloading movies to a USB flash drive to transfer them from the "new" desktop to the old one, so I'll probably start doing that tonight.

P.S. It looks like I need to catch up on my reading. I'm getting free magazines I'm not even interested in but they'll work just fine for bullet penetration tests. 

[alfsauve]

Haven't watched J-Lo in the movie Atlas have you?  Giving your computer a personality takes on a whole different perspective.

Mine is called Harlan.

[Sponsor]

[Big Frank]

I haven't even heard of Atlas. My laptop is named My-POS-Dell-Laptop. And my desktop is called HAL9000.   These things are nothing but trouble.

Open the pod-bay doors, Hal.
I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.

Dave and I were planning on disconnecting him.

[alfsauve]

Jump to :50 seconds in for the Atlas Smith introduction. 

[Big Frank]

Someone made an AI and it went Terminator on them. How original. No wonder it's a Netflix movie. That's why I never heard of it.

I trust computers as far as I can throw then, while I fetch a sledge hammer and flamethrower.

[alfsauve]

The basic idea goes back to the first literary treatment on robots in 1920 R.U.R., a scifi play by the Czech writer Karel Čapek.

Asimov came along later.   Besides the Three laws, his robots created fourth one, Law Zero, which is where they take charge over mankind.   In order to protect us of course.  Kinda like our government.  Hmm you think that robots are Asimov's allegory of government?

[Big Frank]

"R.U.R." stands for Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti (Rossum's Universal Robots). I haven't heard anyone talk about it in a long time, and I had to look up what is was in Czech. I only knew the English translation. The 1920 play had its world premiere on January 2nd, 1921, when it introduced the word "robot" to the English language and to science fiction as a whole. It's hard to believe it's been over a century. I didn't see it so I don't know how it relates to the Zeroth Law, or The Three Laws of Robotics. The word robot means worker. Wikipedia says, in Czech, robota means forced labor of the kind that serfs had to perform on their masters' lands and is derived from rab, meaning "slave". I'll take their words for it. They were humanoid robots, what are known as androids now. I always wondered why robots in Star Wars were called droids. It sounds it's short for androids, but is applied to anything from flying hunter-killers to a "toaster" that delivers mail down the hall.

Zeroth Law of Robotics: A robot may not injure humanity or, through inaction, allow humanity to come to harm. Robots and Empire, 1985, Foundation and Earth, 1986, and Prelude to Foundation, 1988 all involve the Zeroth Law. They're all setting on my bookshelves right now, but I haven't had time to re-read books since I got a computer. I can't even catch up on the new books I haven't read. 

Foundation and Earth contains the following passage:

    Trevize frowned. "How do you decide what is injurious, or not injurious, to humanity as a whole?"

    "Precisely, sir," said Daneel. "In theory, the Zeroth Law was the answer to our problems. In practice, we could never decide. A human being is a concrete object. Injury to a person can be estimated and judged. Humanity is an abstraction."

Unlike the government, they weren't always trying to control people's lives.