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As I chronicled, I have been sans iPod for the last few days. I really hadn’t realized how dependent I had become on it. Although I suppose I was just as dependent on my Palm before that.
It has returned, more than a week sooner than promised, and I am once again attatched to it.
I discovered, in its absense, that I’m no longer able to go back to using the Palm. The touch interface is so intuitive that going back to a stylus, and trying to write with pseudo-letters, is simple too hard to go back to. Score another for technology making us stupid. It’s a wonder I can still write at all.
I received either a new one, or a refurb one. I don’t know how one would tell the difference. It seems new to me. And it is working perfectly. The return slip confirmed that there was a hardware malfunction, and the other device wasn’t fixable. I don’t know how common that is, but I’m pretty sure I’ll be buying the extended warrantly when I get closer to the one year mark from purchase. And I rather wish now I’d spent the extra $35 to get the Best Buy in-store replacement program.
But, overall, I’m *VERY* impressed with how quickly efficiently Apple handled it. Thanks, Apple.
Who’s There?
September 15, 2008
I see him, every now and then,
peeking out for a moment,
and then he’s gone.
I’d like to think I can coax
him out, cajole him into performing
his trick of writing a few beautiful lines,
but it seldom works
that way. When thrust into the lights
he retreats, embarrassed, into the shadows.
Sometimes he shakes me awake
in the night with something to write.
If I don’t get up right away,
he slouches off, discouraged,
and doesn’t try twice.
But if I leap up right away, write
as he dictates, he always rewards
my loss of sleep with a clever turn
of phrase that I can seldom arrive at.
alone. The best I can usually produce
without him
is something more like this.
For a while, I had a podcast microphone that I used for FeatherCast, as well as several other things. It was a Samson C01U USB microphone.
When I say “I had”, what I really mean is that it was attatched to my job. We obtained it to experiment with podcasting, since we were considering putting some podcasts on our website at the time.
Since I have changed employers, I no longer have that mic, and so haven’t done any podcasting since then. But I’d like to get started again. Ideally, I’d like to get a mic before I go down to New Orleans for ApacheCon, so that I can do some FeatherCast interviews while I’m there.
I quite liked the C01U. It was simple – plugged directly into the USB port, and I could record directly from it with Audacity, without any additional gear. Very convenient. And it is fairly inexpensive. There are some other devices that might be nicer, like one of the many portable digital recorders that are out there, but they’re a LOT more expensive, and aren’t really geared to the sit-down interviews and readings that I enjoy doing
But, if anybody has a recommendation, particularly of something inexpensive and good quality, please let me know. It’s been a long time since I recorded anything, and I’d really like to pick it up again.
I’ve long been a fan of the Inbox Zero philosophy. I use my “Unread Messages” smart folder as my inbox, and try to keep it at zero. I’ve managed this for several years now. The notion is that if there’s not an action that comes out of a particular email, then I mark it read and move on. If I need it for some information, it’s there for reference.
I tend to forget stuff pretty quickly, particularly when I get hundreds of email messages a day, after spam removal. So I try to go through my pending email, make a note of the actions that are required, and mark the rest read. Otherwise it just accumulates forever, and once you get behind, it becomes harder and harder to catch up.
I was about 2000 messages snowed under, this morning, but I’m all caught up now. I really need to try to keep caught up now.
ApacheCon is just a few weeks away now. If you’d like to learn all that there is to know about the Apache Web Server, you should come to my two-day training class, which I’m teaching with Bill Rowe and Jim Jagielski, from Covalent. And New Orleans is just a great city, too.
Hope to see you there.
I received this mailing today from American Express. Now, I will admit, I owe American Express more money than I’d like to admit to. So when I receive a note from them that is stamped “LAST NOTICE”, in RED, my immediate reaction is not, “ooh, look, a nice leather-bound desk journal!”, but rather to run for the bank statement, frantically scan for cancelled checks, try to figure out why my AmEx card isn’t paid.
Someone in the marketing department at AmEx needs to be fired for this. It wasn’t amusing. It was profoundly alarming. I can’t imagine who thought this was amusing, but I hope that they were fired for it.
I spent my lunch break at Best Buy, while the Geek Squad guy attempted to do a restore of the iPod Touch. Twice.
Nice guy, but I always feel very miffed when I’m in a tech support situation and it is assumed that I don’t know what I’m doing, and haven’t already done the things that they’re going to try. Several times. But, of course, this is the only reasonable assumption for them to make.
I then spent nearly two hours on the phone with Apple Tech Support, and, while on the phone, attempted the restore twice more. Once again, the tech support guy was very friendly, and genuinely seemed to know what he was doing, but we did what I’d already done, more than a dozen times already.
Finally, he arranged to have a box sent to me so that I can send it to them to repair or replace.
So, the conclusion is that the board inside the iPod is somehow shot. Or perhaps it’s angry at me for my latent belief that Linux is, in fact, a better OS. I don’t know. but one way or the other, I’m getting a new iPod, and nobody knows how to fix the one I’ve got.
I’ve now devoted several hours to attempting to regain the use of my iPod Touch, deceased since about this time yesterday. I have tried every method that I could find documented anywhere in the intarwebs. I have followed the advice of amazingly helpful people on #iphone on Freenode. But, alas, everything that I’ve tried results in the same “failed to restore” error message. So I guess I’ll be taking this back to Best Buy today and hoping that they’ll be willing to do a warranty exchange or something.
Many thanks to all the people who offered me advice and a shoulder to cry on. I’ll let you know if, miraculously, something works before I take it back to the store.
Trying the DFU restore for the 48th time …
I’m caught in the following loop:
… and repeat
Can anyone offer any advice?
