• What about your iPod?

    Flush with my success slaying the dreaded speaker buzz in my recently obtained piece of Apple lore, I decided to once again hack into my dead iPod. (NURSE! GET ME SOME WOOD, STAT!) If you are keeping score, this is case cracking number four (a rhyme I just could not ignore). Without going into too much detail, this near blind foray into the jungle of high tech involved: opening a case not meant to be opened, hacking away in UNIX, and thus far… two hours of processing time on my trusty PowerBook. Sound complicated? Relax. It’s amazing what you can do with a pocket knife, a piece of consumer electronics given up for dead, and no clue what you’re doing.

  • There’s always time for tinkering

    I may be slaving away at work, but that’s no excuse for my trusty PowerBook to sit home alone, sleeping away the day in quiet oblivion. It’s here at the office with me, busily writing zeros to my (for the moment) resurrected iPod. Once it’s done with that it’s got a little reformatting to do… then a little matter of transferring eight gigabytes of data.

    Between you and me, the iPod is probably a lost cause… but don’t tell my PowerBook. With everything else going on, I don’t need it to be upset with me too.

    This just in from the wires… I may be the only person in state government at this moment to have three, fully operational computers, a temporarily restored iPod, and a Palm OS device… simultaneously cranking away on my desk. I’m not altogether sure this is an achievement I should be proud of or not, but I’m getting a shit load of stuff done.

    Mush yon workers.

  • Diminishing Utility

    Tell me this dear friend, what use is a do to list which is continuously added to but never subtracted from?

    Over the last couple of weeks, and extending through the next month, my office has a two to one work needed – work capable of being done ratio. Truth be told, it’s not quite that good. A more accurate description would be to say that we’ve got twice the work we used to have – which was already half as much again as much as we were capable of doing. Pity my poor Palm OS device… tracking those to do list items with the futility of a lone fact checker at an American presidential campaign stump speech.