UtterlyBoring.com is produced by Jake Ortman (e-mail, resume), a 30-year-old dad, percussionist, freelance Web designer, consultant and jack-of-all-trades computer geek, living in Bend, Oregon. He created this so that his expensive journalism and technology degree isn't getting totally wasted. In addition to editing this site in his free time, he is the IT Director and Ad Designer at both Sunray and Discover Sunriver. He has LinkedIn, MySpace, Facebook profiles if you're trying to stalk him.
Opinions and comments on this site are the opinions of the author, not the author's employer, family, friends or pets.
This site is powered by Movable Type and is hosted by orty.com. Internet connection provided by Bend BroadBand. Since December 1st, 2002, there have been 5268 entries. Visitors to this blog have posted 16539 comments.
If you're reading this, you have too much time on your hands.
If you've never been over to FixYourOwnPrinter.com, you've missed out. On more than one occasion, I've had an issue with one of the laser printers here at the office that was beyond a simple clean up or paper jam fix. But a quick trip to their forums has almost always netted me a solution, and their repair kits (which I've bought this and this before) were tremendously helpful.
So why bother doing all this myself? Because I work in Sunriver where the nearest printer repair places are in Bend and on-site service to Sunriver usually costs a minimum of $75 plus labor for repair. The couple times I've had printer guys come out to Sunriver, they've usually been stumped and had to go order parts. So why not just order the parts from them ahead of time and do it myself for a ton cheaper? Yeah, their parts are a bit expensive and the instructional videos are a bit cheesy, but they work. I just spent a couple hours and $30 (for parts) dismantling a Xerox Phaser 860DP to replace the internal heat lamps for the thing that I would've probably have cost me $200+ to have somebody come and do it (plus parts) . It was a stupidly complicated printer to take apart, but it got done (probably would've got done quicker had I not tried to take apart the wrong clutch, but that was my fault), and the stuff from FixYourOwnPrinter.com only took two days to get here.