jonathanspence.com in 2001

This month makes 10 years that I have been doing web development, and 10 years that jonathanspence.com has had it’s own domain and hosting. Lots of things have changed, yet the site is still remarkably similar to what it was like back then.

This design is pretty much the same one it has had since 2002, although I have moved from my own custom built CMS to WordPress, which makes things a lot easier to manage.

I’m working on updating all the old info, since I managed to go almost two years between updates this time.

I always have people look at me like I’m crazy when I say it’s much faster to get around in Houston than back in Marshall or Henderson. As long as It’s not rush hour, or construction, I can get from where I live at 290 and the Beltway to the Galleria area in less than fifteen minutes. Back in East Texas, it took forty five minutes to get to a decent restaurant, and even then there were only a few to choose from. I think people just get zoned out when they are driving on rural highways and don’t realize how much time they are wasting regularly just to get to the store.

[    |xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx|   ]
[    |    vvv        |   ]
--------------------------
[________________________]

The dashes are the circuit board, and the “x”s are the screen. The “v”s are some tiny resistors that are the only thing that sticks out from the board where the screen is. There is a thin foam pad all along the back of the screen, but the screen appears to just sit loose in it’s place. What ends up happening is the screen rocks back and forth over the resistors. Why they designed it this way I have no idea, the only thing I can think of is that the actual production models have thinner foam or something, and once they found there was a problem it was too late to change it. I have noticed the same issue with the demo Lites at my Best Buy, but it is much less pronounced than on my import.

It doesn’t seem to impact functionality at all, but it’s the kind of thing that gets into my head and won’t let go, so I decided to fix it. I ended up making two pads of paper to slip in on either side of the resistors to brace the screen, and it works perfectly. I don’t have any movement at all now and everything still works.

Taking it apart is not too hard as long as you are careful and have a small enough tri-wing screwdriver. There are five screws on the outside, two on the left, two under the little rubber pads, and one in slot 1. There are two inside the battery compartment, one in the upper right and one in the very bottom right. The one in the center of the compartment is unnecessary to remove to take off the case. After you remove all of those, you can take off the case, be careful of the power and volume sliders that are loose. You should probably then carefully remove the shoulder buttons, they have a little spring that is likely to fly off somewhere when you are messing with the rest if you don’t. After that there are just two obvious screws that secure the circuit board to the front of the case. You can’t remove the circuit board easily, or even move it very much, but you can pry it up enough to see what’s going on and put something in there to stop the movement.

I wouldn’t do this unless you are really comfortable taking stuff like this apart and it really bugs you, but if you are the kind of person who already has a tri-wing screwdriver it’s pretty easy. Compared to installing an afterburner in the original GBA it’s very easy.