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Aug072009
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Unbreaking Toys |
This week has passed with relative quiet although I did get out of the house this weekend. This past Saturday evening I met Andrey, Patrick and David for a little outing to Mona’s Café on Carrollton. Before that I went to Andrey’s house to try and resurrect an external hard drive belonging to Andrey’s friend Veronica that wasn’t working. Without having seen the drive, my best bet was a faulty USB controller so I brought along a universal USB drive adapter. Removing the drive from the enclosure and connecting it with the adapter didn’t work. The drive still read as having an 8 GB partition and the rest unpartitioned, probably caused by some sort of fluke involving another flash drive. I then tried restoring the original partition with a program called Partition Table Doctor which worked swimmingly. Mission Accomplished.With the drive fixed we eventually made it to Mona’s where we sat around for a while with a sampling of beers Andrey brought. Patrick’s friend Paige was working there and we saw a lot of her while there. Later on we went back to Andrey’s place and eventually made a run to Rally’s. I was rather tired when I left there sometime after one. Before I did leave Andrey gave me a battered Blackberry 8800 to play with.Over the course of the week I’ve been killing a lot of time with the phone. Apparently it had seen some liquid as there was rust inside but I was still able to revive it with some attention and a new battery. The outer casing is in pretty bad shape so I bought a new housing for it. I also discovered that the microphone is virtually dead and got the part to fix that as well. With the hardware side accounted for I’ve been playing with applications and other such things, this being the first Blackberry I’ve had time to play with for an extended period. The GPS receiver works and I installed TrekBuddy so I can use maps without a data connection.I also watched a few movies this week including One Six Right, How the West was Won and Cinerama Adventure, a documentary about the ground-breaking motion picture process that ushered in widescreen movies.