Monthly Archives: January 2007

iPod rescued

Well, first, some background, I guess. The last update on the topic of the iPod didn’t even mention the sad news: my iPod died last summer. A seemingly insignificant drop inside the car caused it to stop playing music no matter what I did. This made me sad since the iPod mini isn’t available, and besides, it’s not that old! At least, not to my pocketbook.

What I ended up doing was sending the little guy in to iPodResQ. For about $30 they provided round-trip shipping and diagnostic services. It turns out the logic board was bad (sigh), but still, the additional $100 still leaves the total cost far less than that of a new iPod, not to mention accessories. One caveat: the turnaround was a lot slower than their web site seemed to imply. I waited for 10 days all told, and only got a status report when I emailed them expressing my growing concern.

Even with that less than totally satisfactory experience, the repair job seems to have been first rate. When the mini arrived I was able to reload the software and music on it immediately and it’s been running fine ever since. And yes, I’m taking much greater care with it when I hook it up each day…

Happy Christmas

The holidays are past, finally. Don’t get me wrong – I love Thanksgiving, Christmas, and the advent of a new year. It’s just insanely busy around here. You probably know the drill. Needless to say (but I’m going to say it anyway), that leaves precious little time for blogging.

Of note is the fact that our new living room furniture arrived on Tuesday evening. Whilst cleaning the carpets I noticed several problems with the old sofa and decided it was time to retire the old girl. Michelle didn’t argue, so we spent the better part of a Saturday afternoon looking for something. After we got an idea of what we wanted, I decided I had to model the living room and our proposed changes, because we didn’t really know if the new pieces would fit. Enter Google Sketchup; in the space of hours over a couple of days I built a rudimentary 3D model of the major features of the room plus most of the furniture we had planned to keep. It turned out to be a good thing because one of the things we were looking at was a sofa and love seat combo… and the love seat was simply too big for the space available.

Lots more happened but I’m quite out of time at the moment. It seems that I’ve never mentioned some of the toys that have consumed my limited attention span lately (MythTV/iPod rescued!/DS Lite) but I promise, I’ll get an update about some of these soon. Four months is way too long…