Electric Josh

(Parenthetical rant: This space used to be driven by a program that I rolled myself, kind of by hand, and whose chief virtue was that "hitting Save"—that is, saving my work regularly as I typed—was very natural. I typed using Emacs, although any decent text editor would have been fine. Now, though, I have to use this awful Movable Type system, which is a nicer piece of software than mine was in almost every way except that I'm supposed to edit this text in a textarea on a web page, which is a sucky way to edit more than about two sentences of text, chiefly because it takes some effort to avoid hitting the key combination for abruptly quitting the browser. Aaaargh!)

At any rate, I was talking about my iPod that broke 30 seconds out of warranty last winter. The Apple Store helpfully suggested that I spend X + $40 to fix it, where X was the cost of a brand new iPod. After a couple of days my rage evolved into a pair of resolutions: first, that I will never replace this iPod with another one; and second, that I will take this iPod apart and screw around with its contents someday. What I actually did was to toss the iPaperWeight into my (secondary) backpack and forget about it until the other day, when I stumbled across this account of fixing an iPod with a violent smack. Either it starts working or I can smack it again: either way I win! I tried to turn it on in order to verify that it was really broken, but of course the battery was dead, which meant that I wouldn't be able to tell if the technique had worked, so I stuck in into the computer to charge it up and the damn thing spun right up without even a hint that anything had ever been wrong. It's been merrily playing music for me ever since. I've never been so disappointed to have an overpriced piece of electronics working properly.
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The dearth of activity in this space, instead of representing a lack of activity around here, like I'm tempted to claim, really reflects laziness on my part. We've been getting to the beach several times a month, along with sitting around waiting for kid number two to arrive in a month or so, enjoying the bizarre personality of kid number one in the meantime. Not a whole lot else is going on—somehow this (and going to work) take up pretty much every waking hour. Alas.
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