I broke my tablet about a month ago. The screen, specifically. Left it charging on the corner of my bedside table then went to grab it without considering the length of the cable. Even Gorilla Glass doesn’t much like a three foot drop onto ceramic tile, it would seem. (Sorry, I didn’t drop it — I used gravity to place it on the floor, as quoth Rinnly in reference to her own recently similarly-affected cellphone.) Funny, second time in a matter of hours that I’d done that, except the first time was with my plastic-screened phone and I don’t know that it even noticed — it’s seen worse. So there’s Oops #1: lack of attention.
Oops #2, it seems, is having ordered a replacement screen as a standalone piece. I knew it was going to be fun to detach the bezel from the old screen, but I didn’t know it was going to be this much fun. Decided not to get one because it would’ve been another $25 after $100 on the screen. Might’ve been worth it. “Recklessness”, let’s call it — the Oops, not the bezel. After half an hour of alternately waving a decades-old hair drier around the edges of the screen in an attempt to loosen up the glue and delicately prying it further and further back, I gave it a little more of a tug, fractured the screen (not that it wasn’t already fractured before, but it’s more to clean up), and realized the glue isn’t simply on the bezel — oh no, that would be too simple. ASUS, in their infinite wisdom, decided that the bezel should be adhered to the screen (and vice versa) by means of a sort of stencil layer of double-sided adhesive plastic. Gee, lovely. So I’ve already torn that in one place. I hope the replacement screen sticks down OK. As far as detaching the old screen goes, I’m going to cross my fingers and hope it’s sunny tomorrow so I can just leave it out in a warm place.
The replacement screen shipped out with something that might help get it to stick: three pieces of 3M 300LSE. Never run into it before, but Google tells me it’s “adhesive transfer tape”. Peeled back a little corner; seems to be really high-quality double-sided tape, like the stuff that’s on there that I’ve partially ruined, but not cut to shape. Might work. Might have to work. I guess that makes Oops #3 my apparent inability to retain anything from the disassembly/replacement video that, for once, I did bother to look up before I was half-way through the process — again, lack of attentiveness.
Something else the replacement came with was a spudger/prying tool. Nice. I’ve been too cheap to get one. Guess this means I don’t have to. Maybe Oops #4 is that I end up trying to do this crap on a semi-regular basis without adequate tools — unpreparedness. Every time I get new tools, I outgrow the problems that required those tools. Never seems to be because I’ve just solved everything. They say that when all you’ve got is a hammer all problems are nails, but it’s a weird sort of hammer to deal with sixteen-foot tall nails made of grapefruit.
I really like The Codeless Code. They’re software development koans. A cool concept. Sometimes they’re a bit far out, but other times, they’re bang on. The most recent one, Ten Thousand Mistakes, is a good one. Reviewing the four Oopses I’ve just mentioned (is immediate retrospect bad? Is that Oops #5?), none of them are new problems to me and #1 and #3 are even duplicates. Eh, I’ve got another nine-thousand nine-hundred and ninety-six mistakes with which to be original.