aggienaut | Entries tagged with technical problems

   My phone died today. That's my phone, laptop, and external hard drive all in a month (and though it's not in the electronics category I also had to replace the tires on my car). Getting tired of this.

   I had my phone in my hand as I was going through my front door and while jiggling the key I dropped it. It's in a protective case so dropping from doorknob height onto the wooden deck wouldn't seem like it should be lethal. It didn't crack, but the screen stopped working. I still get notifications but the screen remains black and can't be swiped or typed upon.

   It's funny how much one relies on one's phone. I had an hour of driving to do later and usually I listen to an audiobook on audible but I couldn't do that, and the car radio doesn't work so I just had to drive in silence and dwell on my frustration. And my phone is my time piece so I didn't know what time it was for the rest of the day. Or how would I wake up tomorrow morning?

   Not to mention I can hear people messaging me but I can't respond or tell them why I can't respond!!

   The same friends who helped me with my laptop volunteered to come over, even after I said I was in too bad of a mood to drive into town for the usual Tuesday trivia (and even though I live a forty minute drive out into the country from town!!). I don't know how I got so lucky to have such nice friends. So Ben and Mick came over this evening and looked at my phone, determined I probably just need to have the screen replaced and it shouldn't cost me an arm and a leg, and Ben even had an old Galaxy 4 (I think mine is a Galaxy 5) that seems alright except it's got no battery life, that he let me borrow till I get it sorted. Seriously how'd I get so lucky.

   Tomorrow I'm going right into town to try to get this handled. But I still feel very frustrated with everything breaking. As I said all my electronics are of the age where they need to be replaced... which I "can't" afford to do except I'm having to. And now it'll be the same age again, can't it stagger itself?

   ::sigh::

   Yesterday my friend Mick (kind of diminuitive and prematurely bald, a machine programmer for a laser etching place) came over with friends Ben (funemployed, biggish with a grin like a jack o lantern), and Frankie (I.T. guy for a local ice cream factory (!!)) to help me figure out my electronics. Frankie suspected he knew what was wrong before arriving, which I think turned out to be right, and chided me in a friendly manner for several classic calling-IT-support cliches such as telling him what I thought was wrong ("just tell me the symptoms!").

   The external hard drive is completely borked. Toasted. Croaked. It needs to be reformatted which would lose all its contents. Because my laptop had been really running out of space pretty much all my pictures were stored there and some of my documents ... I still have to survey the damage and figure out how many important documents were still on the old laptop instead of the drive. I'm not tooooo heartbroken about the pictures, not as much as when my phone was stolen in Kenya with 40 days worth of photos, since on that occasion I had not yet done anything with those pictures but I've probably posted all the good ones from the batch on the hard drive. But still, I'm going to poke around for data recovery and if it can be done in the low hundreds of dollars might go for it. Everything is wicked expensive in Australia so it might be worth doing back in the states, or as I realized in Kyrgyzstan this last trip, there's actually computer stores and things there with prices a fraction of what they are here so that maybe even I'll be able to find someone who can do data recovery on the cheap there and take hte hard drive next time I go over?

   The camera it turned out just needed to be charged more. It had enough charge to take pictures and conduct all other functions so it hadn't occurred to me it might need to be even MORE fully charged. So that was an easy fix.

   So above and below are pictures from the DSLR! Another increasing problem is that my eyesight seems to be worsening fast and a lot of pictures weren't perfectly in focus I think because I can no longer actually see well enough to quite make it out through the little viewfinder if its perfectly in focus ): ): ):

   Interestingly when you see the two pictures side by side such as on flickr it looks like it could be one continuous picture.

   Anyway, I'm still in the disbelief / denial stage about the hard drive, having trouble / mentally refusing to fully grasp the loss of all my stuff.

***UPDATE: Going through pictures I just realized for some reason my phone HADN'T auto backed up my pictures from August 16th and 17th to google photos, and at the end of the Kyrgyzstan project I had moved all the pictures from my phone into "safe keeping" on the external hard drive ...... so all those pictures are now presumed lost / held hostage by the hard drive!! Ii was in Kyrgyzstan at the time and notably that was the day I got to have my picture taken holding gosh darn eagles. Fortunately I have the pictures from the DSLR (eagles!), and the the small instagram versions of the pictures I posted from my phone to IG. :-/

Current Mood: distressed

It makes sense that most recent entries are served up on top when one looks at anyone's livejournal account, since one most likely wants to see the most recent entries. But often when I want to show someone my entries about a specific adventure, I have them all tagged for easy access, but they of course always come up in reverse order! I don't suppose anyone knows any magic tricks for making tags come up in the oldest on top order??

In other news I swear I'm going to finish posting about the Turkish adventure one of these days. I had left off just at the best part.

Also I want to do a year in review post ... with links back to the adventures, and it would be oh so nice if they'd display in the right order /:

I just pulled some months old pictures off my camera. Pictured above are the schooners Ixy (or Irving?) Johnson and American Pride. The AP has the red sails.

On my laptop the above picture looks properly colour saturated, but when I look at it on the big flatscreen monitor my housemate left here it looks overly saturated like some sort of trashy strumpet.

Conversely, this picture I made look properly saturated on the flatscreen looks very undersaturated (colors not bright at all) on my laptop screen:

So which one looks right on most of your monitors???

Presumably the above is an image of a broken bridge. I don't know, I can't see it. I had to go into the source coding of the flickr page it should have appeared on to get the URL.

Five days ago I went to load up a page of flickr full of little thumbnails and after a few loaded the rest borked out and Telstra informed me that I was out of data. Hijinks ensued because, though the main Telstra pages still load even when you're out of data, the RECHARGE page wouldn't load, which I found extremely inconvenient. But their live chat function did so first I talked to a thoroughly unhelpful little gremlin named Mario, but then got transferred to a spectacularly helpful person named Scarlette who was a pleasure to talk to and very willing to think outside the box to come up with solutions to my problems -- the recharge page not loading turned out to be the least of them -- apparently Telstra has flagged BOTH my US and Australian credit cards as involved in fraudulent activity and even if I get the banks to confirm nothing fishy is afoot it would still take Telstra a month to unflag them! But Scarlette magicked me enough random bonus credit to get to my bank's website from where I could purchase a telstra recharge voucher from my bank and thus Telstra could go on avoiding looking my cards in the eye. d:

And so I was back in business. ...except for one thing. That flickr page never DID load. And ever since then, about 80% of all recent images from flickr have not been loading. At first I thought it was a problem that would sort itself out either between Telstra realizing that I have data now or maybe flickr was having a problem. But now it's five days later, I'd like to be able to use flickr but it's next to impossible when it won't show me most things I upload there. I doubt it's on flickr's end of things, but we can check that real easily: can you see this image??

My hypothesis, given that it's basically just not delivering to me data from the same origin (specifically, several of the subdirectories of farm9.staticflickr.com) as the data it refused to send me when my account ran out of data credit, is that there's some stop order in the telstra system which never got cleared. That hypothesis seems a bit out there to me but its all I can think of given that it doesn't seem like a problem on flickr's end.

I just dealt with another of the thoroughly unhelpful variety of people from Telstra live help chat. He first suggested I unplug the broadband device, but changed his mind when I reminded him that that would, obviously, end our chat. The conversation also included such gems as:
Jayzel: The Flickr website is not from Telstra.
Kris: yes
Kris: but basically Telstra's delivery of data from flickr continues to seem to be frozen in the condition it was when I was out of data
Jayzel: The internet connection would be supplied by Telstra.
Kris: yes
Thank you captain obvious. Clearly from my mention of "Telstra's delivery of data" I was thinking it all came courtesy of Keloggs. He also helpfully noted that I am currently not out of data.

Anyway, I am not really a terribly great necromancer of the dark magicks of internet voodoo and computer sorcery, but I know some of you are, so any suggestions????

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The Agrinautica

Tales of a Beekeeper Errant

Entries tagged with technical problems

More Technical Failures

Technical Difficulties: Answers Found

Reverse Ordering

Saturation Discrepencies

Telstra (?) Technical Problems Part IV

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