There is simply no elegant way to cough with an ice cube in your mouth. And yet, sometimes you must.

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I am about to go solder six 0402 size capacitors onto the circuit board I am testing. I have never worked with 0402 size capacitors. They are small enough that you could probably fit a good 5 or 6 on the back of a ladybug. I know people do it. I’m just not sure how.

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I am a fan of the Gregory McDonald mystery novels, which most folks know from the Fletch movie adaptation¹. The humor style of the books is different from the movie, largely because Chevy Chase is just being himself, doing his own thing. I like both.

I used to own every Fletch, Flynn and Skylar novel, and re-read each many, many times. They are not great literature (Mr. McDonald is a bit heavy-handed with getting a theme across at times) but I like the writing style and his plots are often rollicking. It got to the point, though, where I decided I had just read them enough, and they had to go. I considered bundling them all up and selling that whole batch on eBay, but in the end we gave them to our friend Sarah for a garage sale.

The last thing I had read of his was Skylar in Yankeeland in 1997.

Lo and behold, on a whim, I did a search on Amazon for him today, and he published Flynn’s World in 2003. I’ve been waiting 10 years for a new book, and I only had to wait six! Sheesh.

And on further investigation, I see Fletch Won, the first of the Fletch prequels, is slated to be a movie in 2007. IMDb says rumors are Zach Braff is scheduled to play the lead. I’ll go with that.

¹ Though not the Fletch Lives sequel, which had nothing to do with the book series storyline, largely because the ending of the original movie was different from the book (and much inferior, IMHO).