Author: way0utwest

I noticed that the keys on my laptop were pretty dirty the other day. The heavily used ones have a nice brown stain in places, mostly from just skin oils, and normally I don’t notice them, but it bugged me one afternoon, so I wanted to clean them.

How do I do it? I haven’t ever really worried about it, not traveling as much with laptops as I have with this one, and not using them as much as I have in the last year with this one. It gets used almost every day, moves from the basement to the bedroom, and I wanted to be clean it up.

So I asked my Twitter community the question and got these suggestions:

• qtips and rubbing alcohol do a nice job of getting in between keys’ (@SQLDBA)
• Baby Wipes.  (@RossMistry)
• Turn it off. Turn upside down. Beat vigorously with broom. Turn back over. Wipe down with very wet cloth. Let dry. Turn on; use! (@ChristyLeonard)
• distilled water and a tooth brush. Then let it dry for a day or two before reusing.  Or chuck it and get a new one. (@MrDenny)

I decided to try a few things and document it so hopefully someone else has an easier time. Here’s a before picture, so you can see how things look.

(ignore the date, I didn’t set the date on my camera)

I then started with baby wipes. We keep a few around since they are handy to clean up, or wipe off kids’ skin even at 8 years old! I turned off the machine and lightly wiped a few of the keys. As you can see, it seemed to clean off the keys pretty well. It didn’t take much elbow grease, just a couple minutes of rubbing across them.

My next experiment was to try rubbing alcohol and Q-tips. A quick search of the bathroom netted me some supplies, and I started on the other keys. Here’s the before:

and the after

I think that this worked as well as baby wipes, but it was definitely more effort. After a few minutes the colors was back to white, and the keys felt fine. The alcohol evaporated, and even the smell was gone quickly.

I declined to try Christy Leonard’s solution of using the broom, and I cleaned up the keys enough to not worry about the distilled water and toothbrush. I’ll let someone else try those.

My suggestion if your keyboard is dirty? Use baby wipes. You can pick up a small travel pack cheap, and almost anywhere. You can throw them in your laptop bag, but unless they’re sealed well, they will dry out quickly.

Business conventions are important because they demonstrate how many people a company can operate without.

Since I got to so many, perhaps I’m not that valuable?

This would probably be a good editorial, but I thought I’d drop it out here as a short note.

You ought to be tracking the build (or version) of all your SQL Server instances and Windows. I’d suggest you automate this, maybe even drop it in a table in every (user) database every day.

With the constant release of patches, the changes you might make to a server, it’s easy to lose track of what build a server is at. You might think all your servers are at SP1 or SP2, but you never know when an application might not support the latest version and you’re behind.

The more time that passes between the application or deployment of patches, and a disaster, the less likely you’ll be sure of what patch level you’re on. And if you have dozens of instances, you won’t be sure.

In a disaster, the last thing you want to do is have doubt about what you’re restoring. Track the builds and you’ll be fine. And bookmark my build list pages (2005 and 2008)

The Prius is having a few issues. I’ve had a slow leak in a tire that required two trips to the tire guy to get fixed. It wasn’t so bad since I had to get an oil change as well. I combined a few trips and things worked out well.

I ran into this survey that said half of US citizens would buy a plug-in electric hybrid, or consider one. That’s interesting to me as a hybrid owner. It’s worked out well for me, but it was more an economic decision for us living in the country, with relatively good weather. We drive a lot, and the 50mpg has helped us.

My last tank of gas, with the kids watching, got us to 482mi, with about 9.3 gallons of has. It averaged out at almost 52mph (51.8), which is pretty cool. Especially as we crossed 50,000 miles this month on the Prius. That’s 50,000 in 25 months, quite a lot of driving! A lot of commuting from the country to kids’ schools and even ski trips. I bet half my trips to the mountains last year were in the Prius. Saving fuel, money, and enjoying myself.

The survey above also surveyed people why they weren’t interested. Almost half (45%) listed that they weren’t sure about the technology. I think that’s interesting because the Prius has been around since 2001. While it has matured, a lot of people don’t trust it. I have a friend, who works for the city of Denver. He heard from a friend that all the Prius’ purchased by the city were being sold because of maintenance. He said that in 3 years they needed to have their batteries replaced as a recommendation from the manufacturer.

Hogwash. I can’t convince him it’s not true, even with my owner’s manual. I think his friend (and likely him) have a thing against the idea for some reason. I have a 2nd gen Prius, 2004-2007 age, and my manual doesn’t say anything like that. I’ve seen lots of people putting 200k miles (reportedly ) on their cars before replacing the hybrid batteries.

There’s also a lot of stink about the batteries being polluting and worse for the environment than a Hummer. I can’t believe it. It seems that some people are just upset for no good reason. Maybe they just want big cars, or more power. The batteries are mostly recyclable, as is most of the car. I know these are figures from Toyota, and might be cooked, An argument from Bad Templeton, and an interesting rebuttal as well in the first comment is worth reading.

I’m not sold that hybrids are the answer for the long term, or that they work for everyone, but they’re not horrible cars that break down all the time either.

There’s a cross country tour, using a hybrid that runs on a renewable fuel made from algae underway now. They’re driving from San Francisco to New York in 10 days, stopping in various cities. They go to Salt Lake City, and Cheyenne, but skip Denver. I would have gone to see it, so I’m a little disappointed.

The idea of using a renewable fuel made from algae is great, but I’m a little skeptical that they aren’t saying how much energy is needed to produce the fuel. Ethanol seems OK, but it isn’t necessarily the most efficient way to produce fuel.

However it’s another area of research, which is good to see. The more things we try, the more likely we are to find a good, renewable alternative.

(cross posted to SQL Musings)