Missing week
I got sick a little over a week ago, and although there've been days of non-sickness mixed in during that time, I feel like I've pretty much lost a week. I'm at least a week behind on everything having to do with the magazine, on everything at work, on pretty much everything period.
And it doesn't help when technology lets me down. I've been keeping my email on my iPod lately, and mounting the iPod as a hard drive on the desktop; this morning I was in the midst of my morning email when the computer announced that I really ought to dismount disks the right way, rather than just unplugging them. Uh-oh. Sure enough, the iPod had suddenly shut itself off.
I tried all sorts of things, but couldn't seem to get it to power up. I couldn't find my power adapter; I've always charged it using the FireWire cable that also lets me sync it to iTunes and mount it as a disk. This evening, Kam brought her power adapter over, but I still needed my cable to connect the iPod to the power adapter, and it still didn't work.
I finally ended up going to the Apple Store in downtown Palo Alto, where a nice guy at the Genius Bar let me use one of their cables. Yup, sure enough, my cable had gone bad. I copied my email back to my hard drive with a big sigh of relief (I had backed it up a couple days ago, but even losing only a couple of days of mail is a big pain), and I traded in my broken cable for a new one that works, and the iPod seems to be charging. So, all's well that ends well. But stressful.
I took the opportunity to stop by the Sprint PCS store down the block from the Apple Store, since they're almost never open when I'm in the area, to play with the Treo 650. It's pretty tempting. I could get a $150 rebate for getting one now, and I'd get unlimited web access for $15/month more than I'm currently paying for cell phone service. It would be really cool to be have web access from anywhere, and they have a very nice high-res screen that's pretty readable. (Though some day I really need to create a special stylesheet for SH for mobile devices; the middle text column is awfully narrow on such devices.) But the screen is physically smaller than the one on my current PDA (even though it's double the resolution in each dimension), and I'd really rather have a larger screen. Decisions, decisions. My PDA (a Palm m500) is aging, and the woman at the Sprint store was surprised at the age of my current phone. "It's five years old!" she remarked; to her credit, the "that's positively ancient!" subtext remained unspoken.
What else happened this week? The Todd Smith Satellite juggling clubs I ordered four weeks ago finally arrived. They were worth the wait. Sleek and shiny; and slightly slimmer and lighter than my old Todd Smith European clubs, which I've had for many years. I find the Satellites noticeably easier to control than the Europeans, much to my surprise. And the Satellites may fit in my luggage more easily. I was going to take a photo of them (with the new camera I bought last month, which I don't seem to have mentioned here yet), but the thought of taking a photo and transferring it to the computer and cropping it and uploading it sounds exhausting, which may give you an impression of how much energy I have at the moment.
Hmm. Tomorrow, I'll be spending the day preparing to have people over in the evening, so I should probably go read some submissions now. Don't worry, if I start falling asleep I'll stop reading.
