Replacing my PocketPC, a new Hard Drive, and Bluetooth

It's sure been a great week for distracting myself with gizmos. On Tuesday, I got a replacement PocketPC. For $199, Dell shipped me a new PocketPC overnight to replace the one whose screen I ran over on Sunday. All I had to do was return the broken one as soon as I got the new one. So yes, I'm out $200, but that's cheaper than my other options (ebay, or new one from Dell's website), and a much quicker resolution thanks to free overnight mail. I got the new PocketPC within 18 hours of calling Dell, and restored all my information to the new PocketPC in less than an hour.

Then on Wednesday, I finally got the replacement hard drive for my laptop (my secondary hard drive crashed over Christmas). I installed DOS6.22, Win98, and Red Hat Linux 9 on it, then I left the other 30 gigs for all the random WinXP programs I might use, as well as space for video editing. Ironically, that took much more time than restoring my PocketPC. I still haven't got a lot of teh drivers working.

Then on Thursday, I got an integrated bluetooth card for my Inspiron 8600. I bought it off of Ebay because I was tired of Dell telling me they didn't have the part. It was a little more expensive ($56 vs. $35, including shiiping), but it sure is nice to have it integrated instead of plugging in an adapter whenever I want to use bluettoth. I can't believe how small of a card it was. It was no bigger than an SD card and it just sort of slid into a slot behind the hard drive. It was a really easy install. I spent a while afterwards reinstalling the bluetooth drivers (the belkin drivers wouldn't work with the Dell card), and also figuring out how to use a slightly nicer application to transfer data and appointments to my cell phone (I'm using Sony Ericsson's XTNDConnect now, which is just a little more flexible than the default Windows app).

And then tonight I went to an STC meeting that I thought was about XML and single-sourcing. That was just the pitch, though. It really was a demo of a new Help Authoring Tool, that actually looks promising. I'll have to try it out after we meet our deadlines. Meanwhile, I get the CEO guy who was doing the demo interested in our ne PDF conversion product.

Anyway, it was a kind of geeky week. Didn't get as much done with law school stuff as I wanted to. On the other hand, I do have a lot of new (or replaced) toys to play around with tomorrow when I go to Cali with the BYU Ultimate team. It'll be so cool when I casually start surfing the web on my laptop on the road to Cali without plugging in anything. I wasn't even going to go, until they called me up about 10:00 tonight (when I was at Becky's eating pizza and meeting this friend Jamie who they want to set me up with). They needed another driver and their backs were against the wall. So now I'm going to be warm all weekend, but I kind of feel guilty about all the work I'm not going to get done, and all the meetings I'll miss on Sunday, and the fact that I'm really in no condition to play a full tournament on Saturday. My physical therapist would kill me if he knew I was going.

And it sure will be fun to go. Good night!

Posted January 22, 2004 (11:45 PM) | Comments (1)