My grandfather (John Miner, aka “Papa”, part of the duo of g’parents this site was named for) was quite an electrician.  Mainly self-trained and often times hilarious in his methods (as kids we heard many a “crack” followed by Papa walking kind of sideways with his hair standing up saying “that was a doozie”), he could fix absolutely anything.  I was too busy playing baseball and generally running around being a donkey kid to learn as much from him as I now wish I had.  However, I still try to do some things myself and channel his skills. 

About a month ago, our DVD player crapped out.  The power light was blinking red and it responded to nothing.  Since I was pissed off and I’m super cheap, I searched the internet for “philips blinking red light” and found out that I wasn’t alone.  I also found out that you can fix the problem yourself, if you are up for grabbing a set of tools and a soldering iron (really, I was hoping the internet search would reveal a “press play, pause, stop, play and it’ll fix itself”…. oh, well).  I figured “what the hell” and went to radio shack (see: hilarious Onion story) and bought a replacement capacitor (less than $1).  Then, I got lazy and left it sitting on the shelf for a month or so.  Today, I decided to tackle it and went to town on it.  I realized I shouldn’t be a surgeon, because my hand was Shaky McShaky the whole time, but after about 15 minutes, I got it done.  Getting the old busted one off was the hardest part, because I expected the solder to just melt away, but it just heated up did nothing.  I had to tug like mad on the other side to break it loose, but once I got it loose, it left perfect little holes for the new one.  After that, it was just sliding the other one in, cutting the excess, dropping some solder back on to secure it and putting the board back in place (which was a pain in the arse to get off, but cake to get back on) and then cross fingers and plug it in.  Shockingly, nothing exploded and the DVD player works again.  Holy schnikeys, it turns out I deserve my nerd card.

That soldering iron has now fixed the volume buttons on a cell phone and replaced a capacitor on a DVD player.  Totally worth the ~$10 I paid for it.

And, for the record, I totally channeled Papa to the extreme…. there is a screw leftover with no apparent home.Â