Perpetually Damaged Appliance.

[prev] [thread] [next] [lurker] [Date index for 2005/05/05]

From: sabrina downard
Subject: Perpetually Damaged Appliance.
Date: 19:35 on 05 May 2005
I have a PowerBook.  I recently rebuilt it, as things were succumbing to 
entropy and being eminently hatable.  So, copy stuff to an external 
disk, reinstall, copy things back.  Everything worked great.  Even 
HotSyncing my replacement palm -- HotSyncing had broken ages ago; at 
least six or eight months, but that didn't matter as the Palm was broken 
too.  But I got a replacement, one of the same model that a coworker was 
no longer interested in.  Anyways, rebuilt the laptop, copied over my 
Documents folder, and Palm Desktop saw all of my PDA "users" for various 
gadgets I've had over time, I told it this one was the palm, and lo! it 
synched everything back up just dandy.

Until yesterday, when it mysteriously broke.

Now, I press the HotSync button, the palm initiates the connection, 
HotSync Manager pops up the "connecting" dialogue ... and then 
immediately pops up "Unexpected error [-1]."  Oh, it's an *unexpected* 
error, is it.  That clears everything up.

(And that -1 means a lot, too.  Very helpful.  Appreciate that.)

Grrrr.

So what do I do, but start poking around, looking for things that might 
have changed.  Okay.  Mutter mutter fucking Oracle Calendar fucking sync 
conduits must have fucking broken it[0], surprise surprise, mutter 
mutter.  Disable the conduits.  Pull out the only Oracle-looking thing 
from Palm folder.  Click on Conduit Manager, thinking that that's the 
configurator thingy, discover that that pops up the "Preparing to 
synchronize..." dialogue.  Hit the HotSync button on the cradle ... hey, 
it's working!

Watch it sync, and exit normally.  Think, okay, it's substandard but at 
least it's a possible way to get it working.

Try repeatedly and *completely* *fail* to perform whatever 
goat-sacrifice under a new moon whilst painting symbols on self with the 
blood of a virgin and snail slime magic resulted in it working at all. 
Even try to reproduce the interval of time between clicking Conduit 
Manager and thinking "Oh, it's that; I should hit the button" and 
actually hitting the button.

Of course it doesn't work.  That it ever worked at all was only to taunt 
me.

Hate.

Portable digital fucking overgrown portable Minesweeper.

Gadget.

hatefully,
--s.

0 - I'm *SURE* it's not Oracle Calendar's fault.  After all, it's such a 
stunningly well-done piece of -- gritting teeth -- software that it 
couldn't possibly have managed to fuck up all of my HotSyncing just by 
dropping in a couple of conduits.  Oh, no.  Oracle Calendar is certainly 
above reproach.  Not that it makes me want to change my password to 
"IFUCKINGHATETHISPIECEOFSHITandIHOPEYOUCRACKTHISPASSWORDSOYOUKNOWITTOO" 
or anything, but that's so long and any time you make an error typing 
your password and hit backspace, it helpfully erases the entire fucking 
string because you couldn't possibly know that you only fucked up the 
last one or two characters and only actually need to erase back that 
far.  No, I *love* Oracle Calendar.  It's beyond reproach.  Really.

Generated at 12:00 on 28 Jun 2005 by mariachi 0.52