I purchased an iPod almost exactly two years ago. About one month ago, it began failing intermittently. Within a week, it no longer booted up at all.
When I turn my iPod on, the Apple logo appears, and I can hear the hard drive trying to rev up, but then it clicks. Then I can hear the hard drive again trying to rev up. But then it clicks. That happens five or six times until this guy shows up:
It’s very easy to find the help page that corresponds to this icon on Apple.com. Unfortunately, it didn’t help me at all. After a few misfires I got an appointment today at the Genius Bar at my local Apple Store. (I shudder whenever I call it the “Genius Bar.”) I can pay Apple roughly three hundred bucks to repair my iPod. I can pay someone else as little as $125 to repair my iPod. I can sell my iPod to one of several websites that buy dead iPods, for an unpredictable sum. Or, finally, I can give my dead iPod back to Apple in exchange for 10% off my next iPod. How about 50% off?
Seriously — Are these things designed to last two years after normal wear and tear? I paid 400 bucks for two years. That’s 200 dollars per year. I’m tempted to buy a Nano with its lack of moving parts and ultra small size, but a 4GB is $250 and a 30GB iPod video is only another fifty bucks! But $300 just to get back to where I was a month ago?
PS — Maybe this story has a happy ending. Two weeks ago I bought a Nintendo DS Lite for $130 and it came with a game … F iPod. I’ve got something to do on plane rides.
I implemented K2 today. I will leave it in place for the forseeable future.
I still want to make some changes to the sidebar, but the code is a little bit different than Kubrick, the default WordPress theme and the one I used up until now.
[UPDATE] Sidebar is done. I left out the Newsvine feed. May or may not put that back in.
I’m the type of person who leaves his computer on all the time. For the purpose of this post, I specifically leave it on while I’m at work.
Netvibes, which I have posted about before, is my first homepage. By first, I mean that it occupies the first tab when I launch Firefox. Netvibes pulls down your chosen RSS feeds throughout the day. When it encounters a problem, it pops up a little box like this one.
For the last two or three days, I’ve gotten home to find that same little box. Only, when I click OK, I find another little box just like it, right where the first one used to be. Ten minutes ago I arranged them all over the screen, and took a screenshot, which I have cropped here, but I think you get the basic idea.
That’s a lot of error messages.
I managed to click through all the visible message windows, but after that, a new one appeared when I clicked OK. When this happens (it’s happened more than once), I am forced to call up Task Manager and just kill Firefox.
I estimate that I clicked OK on 100 message boxes before killing Firefox today. I’ve only been gone about eleven hours.
Dear Netvibes: Fix this. If there’s an error, make the whole page crap out to a 404, or something. Anything besides this.
WordPress 2.0.2 is out, with some security and bug fixes. Read about it here.
I added Newsvine to my sidebar and removed digg. Make your own conclusions.
What I want to talk about is the fact that there are not one but two Newsvine sections over there. They represent two feeds (out of a possible three). See, Newsvine presents news from the AP wire — the Wire — and news that registered users might find interesting and decide to seed to the site — the Vine. The third feed, which I don’t pull onto DP.com, has a lot of crap stories. This would lead one to the logical conclusion that the Vine & Wire feed would be roughly half crap. But somehow, the combined feed seems to be the best of the three. This confuses me, although I can sort of envision a fuzzy logic, neural network, popular is good thing going on here.
Right now both sections to the right are identical. I wonder about browser caches, though, and I’m going to check the site tomorrow to see what the headlines are. Hopefully within a few days I’ll have picked a favorite.
Feel free to comment on your preferred feed.
[UPDATE] Eh, they were always identical. I went with the Vine & Wire feed.
I’ve been a fan of HTML humor for some time now, and I couldn’t help but link to this comment on digg.
I decided to add Newsvine’s RSS feed to my Google Sidebar’s Web Clips yesterday, and I received a small surprise — ABC News was the only feed. Also surprising was the fact that the “Automatically add commonly viewed clips” option was checked.
When Google Desktop 3.0 beta came out, I downloaded it. Seems like it might have a few bugs.
Oh, and when I move or delete files it doesn’t follow them. WTF? I shouldn’t have to manually index every time I move a single file. That’s sub-par.
[UPDATE] Suddenly Sidebar is adding feeds. Perhaps it is just trying to vex me.
Still, I complained about how Desktop loses files when I moved them on March 5 … the San Jose Mercury News didn’t write about that until the next day …
I keep reading about Web 2.0. And I keep thinking, “More like Web 1.1.” I mean, I understand the technology behind it — AJAX is the buzzword right now. But check this out:
Web 1.0: Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary
Web 2.0: Dictionary.hm
Maybe this really is Web 2.0.
Trying out a new theme. It’s called K2. Thoughts?
[UPDATE] Yeah, I only had K2 on the site for like twenty minutes. I like it … but I haven’t done any investigation into customizing it. And … I’ve still got that red and black theme tucked away …
PS — I’ve spent the last couple days falling in love with it.
