the highs and lows of technology

I must admit, I am a geek. It must be unhealthy how excited I can get about technology. My wife gets annoyed with me because I seem to be always in need of some new and exciting product that will wire my life a little bit more.

My latest calling has been to acquire TiVo. I had heard amazing stories of people's lives being changed by this wonderous, magical box. Marriages had been restored, enemies reconciled, life snatched out the jaws of death...okay, so I made all that up. BUT, I did hear a lot of good things about TiVo.

Last week I was in Best Buy. (Yeah, further proof that I'm a geek. Sometimes when I am driving near Manhattan Blvd, Best Buy enchantingly sings my name like a siren and lures me in.) The 80-hour TiVo box was on sale...and I had just received a "bonus" (you know, one of those anonymous checks) from church just days before. I immediately flipped open my cell phone and held down the "2" to speedail my wife. (Did I mention I also have a new camera flip-phone? It's very exciting.)

It didn't take too much convincing to gain permission to walk out of Best Buy with TiVo under my arm. Oh, what a glorious day! I got it hooked up fairly easily and I added a wireless network connection yesterday. This thing is amazing. I could sit here and bore you by listing all of the cool things it does...but I will restrain myself. If you want to come over and visit me, I'll be happy to give you a demonstration.

Now, on to the bad news. Yesterday afternoon I my iPod froze and upon resetting it I saw an icon that I had never seen before...the "sad iPod" icon (see the pic).

I knew this probably wasn't a good thing. I tried resetting it again...no luck. I tried connecting it to my computer...it didn't recognize it. I tried calling Apple support...I found out that I would have to pay $50 just to have one phone call with a tech support rep. I researched sending it in to Apple (it is out of warranty), it was going to cost me some absurd amount of money (like $200) to get it serviced.

I was sad. The sad iPod icon made me sad. At this point, it appeared that I was down to two options: (1) I was chunking my iPod and buying a brand new one or (2) I would somehow figure out how to fix it myself.

I did a little bit of research online and discovered that the "sad iPod" icon most probably means that you have a problem with your hard drive. Not good. I held the iPod up to my ear and I could hear a clicking noise...like the head of the hard drive was trying to move but was stuck. I also read that some people had "thumped" their iPod to fix this sort of prob. Hmmm...

So a thumped it...pretty hard. No luck. I tried it again and again and again. (What do I have to lose? It's worthless anyway.) Finally I slammed the side of the iPod against my desk...and lo and behold the menu screen popped up!

And there was much rejoicing.

Everything is fine. I didn't even lose my sound files that were stored on the hard drive.

The moral of the story is: technology is good. When it makes you sad...just bang it against something really hard and it will make you happy again.

The End.