The Very Rich Hours of the Lambrights

It’s been a long time since I posted anything here. For the past month and a half, I’ve been fighting my technology. Just about everything I own has decided to stop working. First it was my iPod, which started off acting flaky with occasional freeze ups culminating with a failure of the click wheel. None of the standard restorations seemed to work; it really seemed like a hardware problem. Feeling like I had nothing to lose, I steeled my nerves and took it apart. The instructions here helped a lot. The click wheel didn’t need to be replaced, I just repositioned it so that it was making proper contact with the motherboard. It’s been running perfectly ever since. Donovan 1, Gremlins 0.

About this time, my PC at home began acting up. Just the occeasional oddity at first: a crash here, a disk integrity check there. Throughout August and early September, however, it kept getting worse. Finally, it got to the point where I couldn’t keep it running for more than 30 minutes and Windows was flagging Explorer as a security risk. I tried restoring to the original install but the PC wasn’t stable enough to make it through the process. A hardware diagnostic program from HP crashed but, before it did, flagged memory as not working properly. I wasn’t sure of the integrity of the test but I knew that faulty RAM can make a lot of weird things happen. My PC came with 1 GB of RAM which I had increased to 2. I took out the RAM that I had installed, rebooted, and everything immediately calmed down. Looks like I found the problem. Donovan 2, Gremlins 0.

At the same time, my laptop at work began to get progressively stranger, with the wireless network adapter not behaving. The problem got progressively worse until we diagnosed it as a damaged motherboard and got it fixed–it was still under warranty. Donovan 3, Gremlins 0.

So it’s been a little tough lately but I’m confident that all is once again right with the world. If you are awaiting responses from me to email, bear with me and I’ll get back to you soon.

In other happy news, the Kansas City Chiefs won this weekend! They were playing the Minnesota Vikings, which means I can’t gloat too much lest family harmony become disturbed. Still, CHIEFS WIN!