Chinese made Laptop Battery Review:
I got a new battery for my IBM ThinkPad, I took a gamble on one of those cheap Chinese batteries from eBay, as seen here: http://www.ebay.com/itm/190800977853
This battery was not the greatest in my opinion and great care should be taken when purchasing such batteries from eBay. This is the second one of these batteries I have purchased, the first one didn’t work correctly at all. This one actually does charge, but doesn’t ever “stop” charging. It does get to 100%, but never tells the computer that the charge has actually completed. Normally if a laptop had a single battery this wouldn’t be any huge issue I think. However, because my Thinkpad uses two batteries the situation becomes a bit of a PITA. If I use it as the primary battery, and it ever stops charging, it will never START charging the second battery. Another sign of cheapness, this battery actually has a bulge in it, as if the wiring was crammed in there and it was acceptable to close up the battery and leave a bulge. This of course means that it doesn’t quite fit correctly, and is an issue from that aspect. Good thing I have decided to keep my existing genuine IBM battery, so I can order Li-Ion cells and properly rebuild the pack using genuine cells that *I* select and install. This has been done before on other batteries, some even requiring a jumpstart to get circuitry to recognize that the pack is actually okay. So we’ll see how it goes. For now, my tuning / electronics development laptop is able to chug along for about 5 hours before a trip to the wall socket, with power management disabled completely. (as it should be, since tuning cars requires watching the screen without it shutting off)
I have had failure of my PIC programmers, to the point where I cannot do anymore with my micro controller projects until I get a new programmer. Rocco here @ TGG has loaned me his PicKit2, so I can continue work on the LCD screen buttons. I plan on working on SGI stuff tonight, but may get to that tomorrow or Wednesday. (Expect to see a writeup on how that is going sometime in the near future.)
Whats been going on at The Geek Group? I have been endlessly busy, and I love that I’m able to contribute to such an epic place. I however have had lots of trouble getting up and reporting for duty at 9am. Even though we open at noon, it seems I am required earlier in the day and I’m definitely not built that way. It’s starting to eat at me, because I’m tired of letting my fellow co workers down. My biological clock has always been this way and I have learned to just live with it, and the fact that it cannot be changed. I struggle with this internally, the sleep schedule thing has always been something of a problem. It took my family probably 10 years to figure out that it wasn’t something that “I could easily change”. . My old job figured it out once they finally offered me a noon – 8pm schedule and productivity increased dramatically. I find myself using my only day off to catch up on sleep rather than work on my own projects that are starving for attention. I will even goto bed at 9pm and find myself sleeping through 11am the next day, not good.
How do I talk to the boss about something most people think is bullshit? How do I change this to work for me? I like volunteering / working here, I came to help TGG, and I’m going to either figure this out or let it tear me apart. Until I reach a breaking point, I am going to grit my teeth and hope it can be resolved. I feel talking to anyone about it at this point is going to make me look like I am full of shit. Sleeping sucks, and I wish I didn’t have to at all to be honest. I don’t like arguing about what time I need to sleep with myself anymore than I like arguing about it with anyone else. Fuck.
I pray that I can somehow find a blessing to trade sleep for working later in the night as that allows me to realize my full potential. Inquiring about this prior has been unsuccessful so we’ll see how things go. This is the hardest I’ve ever worked in my life, can I find the strength from within? Is it time to head back to Colorado? we’ll see in time.