The iPod lives!

Well, I finally got my iPod working again. I was home the weekend with the battery replacement kit, and tried opening it up and replacing the battery. It didn't go as badly as I thought, altho it's stil a bit unnerving to hear so many 'snaps' and 'cracks' when you're levering the end caps off - will they go back on? I got the battery replaced anyway, got the thing back together with no bits left over (always good that) and followed the instructions to leave it charge for 24hrs.

24 hours later, I went to try to update my music. Nothing. Wouldn't turn on. The little 'battery charging' icon was on when it was plugged in, but as soon as I plugged it out, nada. Plugged it into the laptop and got nothing. First thought that went through my head was "aw crap". First the phone died, then the rolex strap broke, now the iPod is fubared. Didn't have time to play with it much after that as I was back on IT support for my mother. Shoved all teh bits into my bag, and brought it back up to dublin.

This morning I decided to have another go. Cracked open the thing again, and straight away noticed the problem - I'd plugged in the power connection the wrong way around! Switched it around and sure enough, was back working! Now all I have to do is wait for the fecker to charge fully and I'm back on the road again! :-)

So, one problem down, two to go......

things of a hardware nature

Well, I finally managed to get a spare battery for my iPod! After trying loads of shops, and each one telling me to tr somewhere else, and then being told the best solution was to send it to AppleCare to get done for €150, I finally spotted it in Maplin on the 3rd attempt (seems they'd just got them delivered in) for €32. So much for AppleCare! Now my only problem is that I left the bloody iPod in waterford last weekend so I cna't replace the batt yet! :-( Looking at the instructions it's not goign to be easy either - they use the word "prise" a bit too much in the booklet for my liking.......

And if only that were all my hardware problems sorted. The phone saga is still going on. I went into them on sat, 2 weeks after I last heard from them and 4 weeks afte rthey told me it'd take 2 weeks to fix. Last time I was told that seeing as I couldn't prve it was under warranty, I'd have to pay €90 to get it fixed and it'd take 2 weeks. So, I go back in expecting to pay out my €90 (or half what I paid for my phone) and get my phone back. Nope! Apparently Ericsson had lost the confirmation order to actually fix the damn thing and sent it back unfixed - a common problem with them apparently. So the guy asked me did I want to send it back and get it fixed again, which would take another week. I bit back my reply of "well, duh, what the f**k good is a broken phone" and said yeah. Think just to be on the safe side I might see who wants to get me a new mobile for Xmas.

Just to top things off, along a similar note, the strap on my fake rolex broke a few weeks back, and I need ot get it fixed. I thought I had some spare links for it but couldn't find them, so I brought the broken links and the watch into the shop to see oculd they do anything for me. Nope, will need a new strap. This of course will probably cost me more than the watch cost originally. Have one last chance, I got another guy a fake rolex of the same model too, will have to see if he has spare links still.....

And on teh last hard-ware related issue of the day, the gfx card on my laptop is acting up again. It seems that whatever they did in firefox 1.0.5/6 to fix the prob where firefox crashes ATI cards & OpenGL, it's back again in firefix 2.0. I upgraded a few days ago and now am lucky to go 5mins of using forefox without the fecking screen freezing or goign black. Sometimes I just get a screen flash and get told "hardware rendeing is fucked, we're gone back to software rendering" which is grand for me when I'm not laying games, but I don't want to be stuck like that for good

It deffo seems to be a firefox issue as well, as I'm using IE7 here for the last few hours and nary a crash have I seen. Thing is, after using firefox, IE7 sucks! It has tabs now which is handy, but you sort of get used to all them nifty little extrensions and stuff, and the font rendering on some of the pages I go to a lot is absolutely brutal (probably the page rather than the browser, but still looks sucky).

My iPod officially sucks.....

Well, it looks like it's time for me to upgrade my iPod Mini. I have it nearly 2 years now (2 years at xmas) and the battery on the damn thing has just about had it. I only ever use the thing twice a day, once walking to work, and once walking home - half an hour each way. Not too much to ask that it survives the trip on one charge is it? At the mo tho, I'll charge it up overnight, it'll work on my way to work, and then die when I'm half-way home that evening. Not exactly what you want in a "portable" music player!

Read a joke(?) about Apple's sales strategy a while back, about their iTunes lock-in:
Day 1: You buy a deveice that can hold 3,000 songs
Year 1: You buy $1,000 worth of music off iTunes
Year 2: You buy $1,000 worth of music off iTunes
Year 3: Your iPod battery dies and you have to start all over again.

It sucks that Apple expect you to buy a new iPod when your old one dies rather than just replace the battery. Looks like I'll be going on the web, see if I can get a cheap nano (my 4Gb mini is plenty space for my music collection, but I might as well buy a 20Gb or 40Gb so I can back up my hard drive onto it). Failing that, there's lots of 3rd parties that will do Apple's job for them and sell you replacement batteries.