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The Unified Theory of Shiny?
Jan. 26th, 2005 12:07 pmIt appears that I am hovering around the critical Shiny Thing horizon of my life. Last night, when I took my aerotech juggling balls off of the charger, I found that one of them had split really badly. This morning, my iRiver has started working again. The Shiny Thing balance of my life therefore remains fairly constant. I now fear for the safety of any new gadgets I may obtain.
As far as the ball is concerned, a guy at Spitz tells me that they had a bad batch of batteries about a year ago which heat and expand when charging. He's had two of his split exactly the same way - aerotech apparently replaced them with no argument whatsoever, so hopefully this shouldn't be too much of a problem.
(Incidentally, Spitz was so incredibly fucking cold that I'm probably not going to be going any more, until the weather turns around. This is a bit of a downer, as it's the one thing in the week that I looked forward to.)
The iRiver worries me more, despite the fact that it's now functional. It definitely was NOT working yesterday. I couldn't turn it on, it didn't light the screen when plugged into USB or its charger, and it couldn't be mounted as a USB hard drive under Linux or Windows. The same applied this morning when I brought it into the office. It failed to show up under USB devices on my colleague's Windows machine the first two times we plugged it in. The third time it was connected, the screen lit up with 'charging', and the device now appears to be fully functional, although claiming to have absolutely no battery charge whatsoever. Bit odd for something that was left on charge overnight 2 days ago and hasn't been used since then.
I'm not even sure what could be wrong with it now, but if it's going to be something intermittent, the chances of me getting it replaced are pretty much zero. This could get very very annoying.
As far as the ball is concerned, a guy at Spitz tells me that they had a bad batch of batteries about a year ago which heat and expand when charging. He's had two of his split exactly the same way - aerotech apparently replaced them with no argument whatsoever, so hopefully this shouldn't be too much of a problem.
(Incidentally, Spitz was so incredibly fucking cold that I'm probably not going to be going any more, until the weather turns around. This is a bit of a downer, as it's the one thing in the week that I looked forward to.)
The iRiver worries me more, despite the fact that it's now functional. It definitely was NOT working yesterday. I couldn't turn it on, it didn't light the screen when plugged into USB or its charger, and it couldn't be mounted as a USB hard drive under Linux or Windows. The same applied this morning when I brought it into the office. It failed to show up under USB devices on my colleague's Windows machine the first two times we plugged it in. The third time it was connected, the screen lit up with 'charging', and the device now appears to be fully functional, although claiming to have absolutely no battery charge whatsoever. Bit odd for something that was left on charge overnight 2 days ago and hasn't been used since then.
I'm not even sure what could be wrong with it now, but if it's going to be something intermittent, the chances of me getting it replaced are pretty much zero. This could get very very annoying.
