tech
I bet I'll be missing some meetings...
My Palm Pilot died yesterday. OK, so they don’t call it a Palm Pilot anymore; mine is actually the Palm Tungsten E. It has served me faithfully for the last 18 months, keeping me apprised of impending meetings at work, storing the orders of worship from 2 years' worth of church services, keeping a running list of books that I want to read, and giving me hours of diversion with games when I’m bored.
Yesterday it died. When I picked it up at 2 PM, the screen was frozen with the notification “Meet with Christy re: Performance Review, 8:30 AM”. It’s quite possible that I hadn’t picked it up all day… It wouldn’t power off, it wouldn’t go to any other screen or program. So, I hit the reset button. It reset OK but as soon as I hit the home button to get to the main screen, it powered off and wouldn’t come back on. Next I tried the hard reset that erases the memory. Same story, still no luck.
I was thinking at that point that it was a good thing I bought the 2-year replacement plan for it. It cost me an extra $50 at the time, but hey, OfficeMax guaranteed immediate replacement if it broke. So this afternoon I took it back to OfficeMax. I had all the paperwork in order; the receipt, the packaging with the UPC and Serial number, the brochure detailing the replacement plan. I knew that they don’t sell the Tungsten E any more, so I wasn’t sure how they would replace it, I figured maybe I’d have the option to buy-up to another model.
The manager at OfficeMax was very nice; he checked and verified that they don’t sell the Tungsten E anymore. Then he told me that means that I have to call the 800 number on the brochure. So I called the 800 number. They are going “within the next 7 to 10 days”, to send me a postage-paid address label. I have to package the unit up, along with its accessories, and send it back to them. Then, “within 10 to 15 days after receiving the device”, and after determining that it really is broken, they will send me an OfficeMax gift card good for the original purchase price of the unit.
This has me pretty darn frustrated. First, that the “replacement plan” really isn’t immediate replacement - it’s going to take the better part of a month. A month? Come on, I use this thing every day! And I can’t just get a replacement w/o laying out any more cash - the Tungsten E2 (the current model) costs $50 more than the old E, which means I’ll have to lay out that money out of pocket to get the new one, and then more money on top of that if I want to renew the replacement agreement. And of course since it’s a gift card, I’m limited to purchasing one that they sell from OfficeMax, which precludes me shopping around. Arrgh.
Shouldn’t a PDA last longer than 18 months? I’m not really that hard on it. Maybe I just have bad luck with electronics.
occasional down time
Don’t be surprised if you see occasional downtime on my blog here over the next several days; the server on which it runs has been under attack by spammers for the last week and Geof (the trusty and generous hosting provider) is having the server wiped and then doing a full re-load this weekend.
Best wishes to Geof as he spends his weekend at a no-fun task.
I should have my geek status revoked
As I noted in my post to Mr. Murphy a week or so ago, I’ve been having problems with the new projector at church. I talked to the tech support guy today and we walked through stuff for 15 minutes, and he couldn’t figure anything out either. He left me with two other things to try, and if neither of them worked, then we’d send the thing back for warranty repair.
I tried the first, which was to send a composite video signal through. It worked just fine. So then I tried the second, which entailed getting the projector down from its stand and taking it into the office to hook it up directly to a desktop PC. Still no dice. At this point I’m pretty frustrated, and just sitting there thinking about what else it could be. I idly started playing with the rotary input control on the top of the projector, and all of a sudden - voila! It’s working! What could it have been?
The whole time I have been pushing the VIDEO button on the remote control, trying to cycle through composite video, S-video, and BNC. What I hadn’t been doing is pushing the RGB button right next to it. Arrrgh. As soon as I push that button, it switches to the RGB source, and everything works fine.
I should have my geek status revoked for a week or two for this one.
[Note to tech support: even if the guy on the other end sounds smart, don’t assume that he is. Remember that there’s a RGB button on the remote, and ask specifically if he’s using it. Even smart-sounding guys can overlook obvious stuff when it’s a new piece of equipment.]
Mr. Murphy works on Sundays
Mr. Murphy and his dang-blasted law were working busily yesterday. It was certainly one of those mornings.
It started off innocently enough, just another Sunday morning, with its usual hassles. It didn’t really start to go downhill until about 10:15, when I was trying to fit the pastor with the new earpiece microphone. It’s supposed to bend to fit to your ear. It bent just a little, and then… *snap*. It just broke in two. We’re talking a $400 microphone here. It’s still under warranty, so I’m hopefully they’ll replace it. It shouldn’t just snap like that. We switched the pastor to the regular lapel mic and that went OK.
So then I ran back into the sanctuary to hook up the laptop to the new projector (which we used for the first time last week) to show some announcements before the service started and then to run the slides for our song lyrics. First, I couldn’t turn on the projector until Sunday School (which meets in the sanctuary during the summer) was over… and it ran late, didn’t end until 10:28 for a 10:30 service. So finally I turn it on, only to read with with horrified eyes, “NO VIDEO SIGNAL DETECTED”. Arrrgh. No time to debug, gotta switch to plan B. Fortunately the old overhead projector was still sitting in the back of the room, under the coat rack.
Sam was kind enough to grab it for me so I could go start my piano prelude. He also pulled the overheads for the songs we were singing. Becky agreed to run the overheads for me. We got the service started about 5 minutes late. When we finally got to the singing portion, the second song was supposed to be Open the Eyes of my Heart. I’m in my usual tuned-out, eyes-closed mode. After singing the first couple lines, I look up at the screen to see it… blank. I look over at Becky and see a helpless look on her face - Sam had mistakenly pulled the overhead for Open Our Eyes instead of Open the eyes…. I kinda stopped mid-song and apologized. But folks know the song, and were singing pretty well, so we just continued sans lyrics. I think it ended up working OK but I was so dang frustrated it didn’t really matter to me at that point.
I pulled out the ladder afterwards to check out the projector and I still don’t know why it’s not working. I tried a different laptop, but still no signal detected. Today I’m going to try a different monitor cable and see if that’s the issue. There’s not that many links in the chain, so I should be able to localize it…
…oh, and next time, Mr. Murphy? Take Sunday off.
the joys of web design...
I’ve been on a web page design kick lately. First it was with my church’s web page. The updates I made to it never hit the web; you can look at www.noelridgebaptistchurch.org to see how badly it needs it. I think we’re actually going to go to using a professional design site (www.faithconnector.com) for our web pages; it’s worth the cost to get a professional-looking site, and they offer some great features.
I got set up as a webmaster on a separate site last week; I’m setting up a site for my pastor’s Reconciliation Ministries. It’s still in progress, but I’m learning a lot. The last time I did web page design was about 5 years ago (check this page out… scary!) before they had cool things like css. I just bought a book on CSS and DHTML last night and it’s going to save my butt when it comes to doing web pages.
Anyhow, I’m a long way from being a professional, but it’s fun to use my skills once in a while. Girls only want boyfriends who have great skills. :-)
Old music... great memories
So I got an iPod for Christmas… and of course the next task is ripping all of my CDs to mp3s so I can put them on the iPod. That was a task in itself. I’m almost done… (done with all the popular music, about halfway through the classical.) So then I got curious and started wondering about converting all the cassette tapes that I’ve got… (there’s not as many as the CDs, only probably a dozen that I’d care about converting, but still…)
So I researched it a bit online and figured out that by running a cable from the headphone jack of my tape deck into the line in input of my PC, I can record those old tapes. And the free dBPowerAmp software is really slick for recording them; it will automagically sense dead time between songs and split it out into separate mp3 files… too cool. So, now that the geek in me was satisfied with my use of technology, I could get on to recording all of my high school tapes. And that was the scary part.
I was a big Michael W. Smith fan in high school. So of course some of the first tapes to get converted were his albums The Big Picture, Go West Young Man, Change Your World, and The Live Set. (To be fair, a couple of those were done when I was middle-school-aged… and I just picked them up in high school. :-)) And then there were a couple old Amy Grant albums, and Michael English’s two good albums that he released before his confession-of-an-affair-and-returning-all-his-Dove-awards debacle. And an old Steven Curtis Chapman album or two.
If you’re reading this and recognize all these names, then you’ll also recognize that my musical scope was a bit limited in high school; my folks were pretty adamant that Christian music was the only choice (although jazz and classical were also OK), and I was remarkably content with that. The downside is that now as an adult I feel like I missed a few things… but that also makes for neat discoveries. I got the 2-CD set The Essential Bob Dylan this weekend and I’m enjoying it immensely. Probably wouldn’t have appreciated it when I was 17.
What a difference a decade makes.