Replacing batteries
Things run down; the power cannot hold; mere entropy is loosed upon the world.
Not too long ago, I finally replaced the batteries in my father's calculator, which I keep promising to write about but that'll still have to wait.
A week or so ago, a light bulb burned out in my kitchen; I used the nifty suction-cup device to successfully remove it from the high ceiling, but the experience was kind of fraught; I really don't trust that suction cup to hold onto the light bulb. I haven't put in the new one yet, mostly for fear of dropping it.
The other day, I found my two pocket watches, and decided to try again on replacing their batteries; that seems to have worked for the moment, though in my experience they never stay working for long.
Over the past week or so, my remote key for my Prius has been intermittently failing to work. This morning, it stopped working entirely. After some difficulty figuring out how to get to the battery compartment (thank goodness for the Internets—I would never have figured it out on my own), I replaced the battery on that, too.
Got home this evening exhausted and headachey, got out of the car, and the car alarm went off. IT IS VERY VERY LOUD. I never use the damn thing; sometimes it just goes off. I pressed the alarm button on the remote key, but it had no effect. I eventually got it to turn off, but it was kind of nerve-wracking.
The other night, when I went to play DDR, the Wii told me that there was an error reading the disc. No idea what to do about that.
I've also recently doubled the memory in my laptop (seems to be working okay so far) and installed a new larger-capacity hard drive. Copying the old hard drive to the new one was something of an adventure; among other things, I spent half an hour trying to find out why Disk Utility was giving me a particular error message when I tried to initiate the copy command. Many people on forums report this error, but all of the answers given by other forum users are useless. Eventually I found an answer that said to use SuperDuper instead of Disk Utility; I did that, but because it's a file-level copy instead of a bit-level copy, and it explicitly declines to copy certain files, it makes me a little nervous.
And it didn't preserve continuity of backups. So now when Time Machine runs, it wants to back up all 230GB of the old files, even though few of them have changed. Which means I need to clean a bunch of stuff off of the Time Capsule drive, or just get a new larger-capacity one (and then do another old-disk-to-new-disk copy).
At work today, the calendar system was slow to update in various ways, resulting in my not finding out about a rescheduled meeting (that I had asked to be rescheduled, though I hadn't specified a time) until it was about to start. I've been having a lot of unfortunate calendrical difficulties lately; some have been my fault, but most have been due to various things not updating when they should.
Anyway. It's not that all my tech has been failing; but some has been failing, and there seems to be a theme of attempts at renewal and restoration and improvement of tech items in my life lately, mostly with an undercurrent of the likelihood of failure or of stuff not going as desired.
But on re-reading this entry, I feel like it sounds like a series of complaints. It's not really intended that way, or not entirely. New batteries do carry a certain promise of renewal; a step in the fight against entropy, against all odds.
I could use some new batteries myself. I think I'll go to sleep and see if that helps.
Unrelated P.S.: Here's a math problem. If you have five meals' worth of leftovers in the fridge, and you eat one meal's worth of leftovers every day, and you add two meals' worth of leftovers to the fridge each day, how long until the fridge explodes?
