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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Not that notable. He got therapy for recurring nightmares and PTSD after his assimilation by the Borg. Dealing with his trauma was the central theme of s4e2 Family. It was some of Patrick Stewart’s best acting in the whole series, right up there with s5e25 The Inner Light.

    What the show didn’t do was make his trauma and recovery an ongoing part of the series. That’s not because they wanted him to get over it, it’s because of the episodic nature of the show. For syndication to work, they needed most episodes to be self contained. This dramatically enhanced the show’s rewatchability, as should be the case for all great syndicated shows.




  • Only other thing I can think of (since you already said you didn’t use metal utensils) is that something stuck to the enamel and pulled off a chip. It’s not very common, but some kinds of chemical bonds with glass can be strong enough to break the glass when pulled away (enamel is a type of glass).

    The tensile strength of glass varies dramatically and randomly based on invisible defects. That may be what happened here.










  • A soldering iron isn’t going to get the job done for high density BGA packages. Example chip:

    All those dots are balls of solder. The chip needs to be placed on the board in exactly the right position and orientation, and then the whole thing placed in a reflow oven so that the solder balls can melt and flow appropriately without bridging any connections.

    Doing this at home without the right tools is essentially impossible. With the right tools, it’s merely quite difficult. Reflow soldering takes experience and carries the risk of damaging other components on the board which may not survive the temperatures in the reflow oven, so need to be removed first. Plus the reflowing procedure itself is guided by a temperature profile which would have been developed through experience in the factory with specific adjustments for the thermal characteristics of this board. Get the profile wrong and you may break other connections when the solder fails to flow, or have other chips on the board come loose.