Nov 19 - A Rebuttal

In his comments on a recent post, friend of Cruelty and all-round Red Lantern, Jim Dandy, lobbed the following incendiary over the wall:

I assume you posted this bit of "feel goodishness" to distract us from the unveiling of the Gamecube Portable, which was, I assume, supposed to be unveiled in celebration of the 10th birthday of the Gamecube.

Mr. Dandy trucks in language, so it's hard to tell whether he's anxious to see the unveiling of the GameCube Portable or if he's skeptical that it will amount to anything more than a series of skillful Photoshopped forgeries. To his credit, Jim Dandy pulls back on the joystick with some further commentary:

I sarcastically offer the European launch date (May 3) as your next target as I couldn't meet any date for a project of this kind no matter how far in advance.

So now I think he's actually suggesting that the GameCube portable is entirely feasible, but it's going to take many more months of effort before he can hold it in his hands. In this, as in all things that matter, Mr. Dandy is right on the money.

In hindsight, I have no clear picture in my head of what happened. At Noon today, all signs pointed to making some major progress in getting the GameCube Portable assembled. We dry-fitted the motherboard, batteries, and fan, all to get a sense of where things needed to be. Out of that exercise, we decided that a number of wires could be made much shorter, just to keep the guts of the device as clean as possible.

It should have been simple. Simply clip a middle section out of some wires, twist the ends together, and finish off with a little solder and protective tubing. But everything went to Hell, somehow. A resistor and LED broke away from too much handing. A trigger (yea, that trigger) suddenly stopped working. While triaging those problems, some wires came into contact in a bad way and we may (or may not) have fried the power-recharging circuit-board.

By dinner-time, the project was in dire straits despite my best efforts at cursing it into obedience. JediBoy kept a cool head, of course, and talked me down off the ledge.

"Leave it alone, Dad", he said. "Let's sleep on this and see how it looks in the morning.".

Damn his voice of reason! But he's right. It's time to step away for a few hours.