Polished silver nipples

Here I was soldering my third sound-to-light for Laetitia. The second one (the one you sent me) failed for no reason I can fathom. The first problem was the solder wouldn't stick to the copper surface. It defied me completely, just absolutely refuses to stick to what it should. I was mystified, I thought it was me, I thought I had reverted to being an apeman fiddling with technology. However, a friend Ilyah pointed out that it was in fact, the solder, and he retrieved another solder with a higher percentage of lead from his laboratory in the basement. The new solder worked like a charm, sticking so well that I felt like a soldering pro. I was quickly becoming efficient at this, this being my third attempt. At the end, I thought, nothing could go wrong, it was the most perfect soldering job I've ever done, each connection looked like a perfectly polished silver nipple. Battery on. Light on. Light responds weakly to sound. Light is on even with zero sound. Third failure. I was in despair, near tears. I couldn't see the problem, I thought the connections were perfect. I left my failure and had dinner, swam forty laps, and thought sadly about going to amazon.com and trying out this amazon prime special for students so I can get another kit shipped to me for free.

Then I thought: hold on, what would Jimmy do? Jimmy wouldn't take this lying down. He's not that kind of guy. Jimmy would retrieve the carcass of the second failed attempt, he would try changing transistors between the two carcasses and somehow he'd coax life into one of them. So I returned to the physics building in the middle of the night, and started removing a transistor. Which transistor to start? I didn't know. They ALL looked good to me. I chose the one closest to the edge first, the easiest to extract. I started remelting the solder on the three legs of it, except, ironically, I was foiled by the solder again. The solder stuck so well to the copper I couldn't scrape it off hardly at all. I succeeded in removing half the solder off the three legs, and tried to pull off the transistor. It's stuck.

I ran out of ideas, I sat down and played Deathly by Aimee Mann on my labtop. Idly I put on the battery again; I've been doing this all evening, staring at it, willing it to work properly, foolishly hoping it would, but it never did. Except this time it began flashing to the rhythm of the song. It worked! I don't even really know why, something about THAT transistor. Whew, I sat down and played more music and watched more flashing lights. I feel alright again, more than that, I feel great. I went down to the basement and looked for a friend to hug, but its 3 am and nobody's here.Today I fly to Singapore and can finally make good my promise.

This one is for you, Jimmy.