So I finally got my power turned back on tonight a bit after 6:00…have been without since Thursday afternoon.  Only really frustrating part was throwing out a lot of good food.  Hardest part was trying to figure out what to do with myself having no computers/internet other than my N770 on GPRS.  Mostly looking forward to a warm shower!

I wasn’t home during the storm and downtown (just a few miles away) it wasn’t that bad down there.  Neighbors reported that it was the scarriest storm they’ve been thru (for whatever reason, Chicago seems to never really get hit that hard?)  One even mentioned that the windows in their home were bowing from the crazy winds/pressure.

I’m amazed by some of the huge trees that came down — uprooted and all.  The pictures speak for themselves.

In the last 30 days, I’ve killed so much hardware it’s not even funny anymore.

• Zen Micro died today. After my first look it was grim. Put it back together tonight and surprisingly enough, it actually partially works. I even once got it to power on to the recovery screen. I also managed to crash Banshee with it once (that’s good sign!) But the touchpad is completely fried. This is bad. However, I think that my selection of tool was adequate for the task :)
  • A replacement may well be on it’s way…
• Nokia 770 is on the fritz. Been dealing with multiple issues:
  • Battery doesn’t seem to be physically stable anymore. I find my N770 turned off sometimes, and sometimes even a small wiggle of the battery does it.
  • Hasn’t been powering on all the time. Usually takes me ten minutes of futzing with it to make it come alive, and even then it crashes a lot at first. This seems to have steadied off a bit, if such a thing is possible.
  • Did I mention crashing? Yes, lots of crashing. Applications dying, particularly Opera. Kernel panics. Lost my maemopad database the other day, and my backup had puked the night before so I lost some important notes.
• Lost a hard drive, likely related to moving. Was a nice WD SATA 160 gig from a RAID1 setup. Thank goodness for Linux MD support being awesome and handling this properly, you’ve saved me oh-so-many times over the years.
  • Neat fact: I installed that hard drive nearly two years ago. That’s probably the longest I’ve ever had a hard running data drive last. Much better than the WD 60 gig drives I used to have to buy every six months!
• My stupid onboard IDE controller is on the fritz. I swear, it has a timeout of 8 hours, and then it dies, and I have to reboot. Fortunately that just means that I loose my optical drives. Unfortunately for me, it means that I lose my temper at midnight when I’m in the middle of a good movie, half asleep, and the movie quits. Don’t mess with me that late at night.
• Laptop is finally giving in again. I blame this on the travels. The LCD backlight won’t stay on for more than a few seconds. So it’s pretty much become an incoming SSH only box. As a matter of fact, I haven’t actually used it for anything in two weeks.
• Camera is dying. I’d blame this on the travels, but this is actually because I dropped it^W^W^W it’s getting old. Seems that some days the zoom motor just refuses to move. 2003 was a great year for digital cameras, but it isn’t anymore.

So with that, send me your hardware folks, and I promise — I’ll send it back in pieces!

Oh and I’ve broken other things…I’ve smashed this…and I’ve run the cat out the window! (Eddie Izzard joke) (you should laugh)

So yesterday I was quite convinced that I was going to make it down to see the Chicago Air and Water Show, hoping I could see the Thunderbirds.  Well lets just say that we got water alright.  I stood out in the rain for well over an hour hoping to see something, but it turns out that they cancelled much (if not all of it).  I came home soaked to the bone, but I had been smart enough to put all the electronics in my bad inside a spare plastic bag — or had I?

Last night I was unpacking my bag and found my Creative Zen Micro down at the bottom of the bag.  It was a sad sight.  I might as well have just gone for a swim in the lake while I was at it, because it was dripping, and I could see water inside the screen.  Tonight, with the help of this handy article at hardwarezone.com, I took it apart and found what I expected — pools of water inside the device. I’m hopeful that I can pull the ole “let it dry, reassemble and it’ll work” game, but I’m doubtful.

Does anyone have an old/spare MTP device that they’d be willing to donate or provide cheaply so I can work on MTP stuff for Banshee?  I’m going to comb eBay of course, but would be happy to take one off someone’s hands if they have a spare.  I don’t really have the cash or need these days to buy anything new.  If you have one, drop me a line!

In the mean time, I guess I’ll just have to write really clean code for Banshee that works perfectly, right? ;)