Monday, April 24, 2006

Rage against the Machine

Karma must have a strange balance, with all of the good things happening in my life there is also the bad. Since I've gotten out here, all sorts of electronic equipment found an excuse to die in my presence.

First to go was my work thumb drive which survived less then 24 hours in my office. Came in to work one morning and the computer wouldn't read it, it said 0 bites available and wouldn't even let me reformat.

Next was our brand new printer. Had a lightning storm blew out our power and noticed the next morning that the USB plug was blackened and my computer wouldn't turn on. So I opened up the side of printer where the USB plug went and there was a blackened line going across the circuit board and a nice fried electrical smell. Then I pulled out the USB 2.0 card from the side of the laptop and it made a rattling sound when I shook it. Hmm, that doesn't sound healthy. After pulling the card out, the computer started up fine. But the printer had a life span of only 5 sheets of paper and my poor USB 2.0 card, sacrificed its life to save the precious laptop. Sigh!
The next victim on the list of death was my trusty 8mm camcorder which survived two prior trips out here. I put a tape in and a snapping sound came from the inside of the machine. I took the tape out and with it a miscellaneous piece of plastic fell out. What I mean by miscellaneous is, have you ever paid attention to how many small parts are inside of an 8mm camcorder? Lots and lots, it took a mad genius to have figured out how to make it work in the first place, smoke and mirrors I say. I couldn't figure out what the thingee attached to but now the camcorder wouldn't close and every time I tried closing it, it gave an electronic wail so I pulled the battery and put it back in its bag.

This put a major bummer on my side hobby for this little trip. I was going to transfer 100 or so hours of 8mm footage to DVD's, I had brought my mother load of 8mm tapes out here with me with footage all the way back to 1992. Guess that's on the back burner till I get another camcorder.

I came out here with my external hard drive which had back ups for all of my music (21,000 songs) and pictures (25,000 or so) but neglected to bring my power supply. So I called my lovely wife and she ran it to the post office to sent it too me (along with some jasmine rice, homemade cookies, a pink flamingo, a rice maker, other rare yummy treats and odd drinks that you can only find in an Oriental food store, thank you very much hun, all the more reasons to worship you.) I got the package yesterday and could hardly wait to get everything hooked up. Turned on the power and a really large smelly cloud of black smoke came out of the hard drive. Oh brother.

The power supply was rated from 100-250 volts, ready to take anything on the planet. Even so I plugged it into 110. It's a mystery.

Anyway, this is all just a test of my emotional stability, in reality as long as my wife and family are alright, none of this material junk really matters. It's just stuff, I'm sure to pick up lots more of it before my time here is done. I have all of the good pictures of my son and wife backed up on my laptop, home external and fotopage. I've already pulled the music I listen to the most onto my laptop here and MP3 player. The 8mm tapes are still good, just need a camcorder to play them on at a later date. And finally the printer and thumb drive belonged to my Uncle Sam, which means I'll just have to turn them back in an hope for new gear, until then I'll just use the network printer and walk next door. Oh well, such is life and after all it does go on.

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