The World of Stuff .com

Beware the sweater

My guitar is broken. The good one. Well, the better one, anyway. It’s an Epiphone Dot that I got about four years ago. The problem is that it has no sound. I tried switching between pickups, cables, and amps, but no dice. Actually, the guitar had this very same symptom a few months ago, and a quick spraying of the three-way switch was all that it needed. This time, it wouldn’t work. There was obviously a problem in there, but the thing about archtop guitars is that there’s no door in the back that opens up to reveal the electronics. The only way in is through either of the f-holes.

My dad took a look at it noted that the switch and the output jack were corroded quite a bit. He blamed it on sweat. As it turns out, I do sweat quite a bit, but I’m pretty sure I don’t sweat all over the switches and jacks of my guitars. After a good look, he decided that we needed to take it somewhere to get it fixed. I called the store where I bought the guitar and asked if they did warranty repairs for Epiphone. They said that they did, so we took it in. The repair guy was very helpful. He took the guitar into the back to make sure it wasn’t something he could fix right away. It wasn’t. He also took notice of the corrosion, and my dad told him what he thought the cause of it was. The guy called me a sweater. Meanwhile, I was sweating.

Anyway, the repair guy said that it was probably the jack that needed to be fixed, and the biggest hassle would be taking apart the electronics and pulling them out through the f-holes. He said he could have it back in a week or so. That’s fine as I’m in no hurry and I have other guitars. I just hope that it’s not too expensive. Otherwise, I could have put the cost of the repair toward, say, a new guitar.

As I’ve been moving from Windows to Linux, I’ve had some crazy Linux adventures. Most of my experiences have been pleasant, save for downloading codecs for proprietary formats. (The downloading itself was fine, but everything on the screen becomes scrambled if I try to view WMV files or DVDs in fullscreen mode. I can just barely see the screen well enough to allow the computer to reboot, which brings things back to normal. The annoying thing is that I’ve now caught this happening after getting out of the screensaver. Hopefully that one was just a fluke.)

On the positive side, I’ve learned some things about Linux that make maintenance a lot easier. See, every Saturday morning, I scan my Windows machine for spyware and viruses; delete browser caches and cookies as well as unwanted e-mails; empty the Recycle Bin; and defragment the hard disk, in that order. It turns out that in Linux, steps 1 and 4 are unnecessary. None of the few viruses that exist for Linux are found in the wild, and in order for a program to maliciously affect your system, you’d have to go out of your way to give it permission. Linux spyware (if it exists) would have to be run the same way. And here’s an easy-to-understand article on why Linux doesn’t need defragmenting. Those conveniences free up about 99% of the time I’d otherwise have to spend on keeping my system orderly.

For those who enjoy Ambrose Bierce’s cynical Devil’s Dictionary, here’s a modern version: The Devil’s Dictionary (2.0).

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