Last week, I took a couple days off work to take the Wife and Kids to Silver Dollar City in Branson, MO for a mini vacation. My in-laws went with us, and helped watch the kids so we could actually ride some rides. Unfortunately, we had a casualty. My Razr phone got a little damp soaked on a ride that was a bit wetter than I anticipated.
After it dried out, it would boot, then show “bootloader usb init” in the display. I read somewhere that you could clear that error by pressing # + * when turning it on, but that didn’t work. The Alltel rep said the phone was hosed and all I could do is get a new one. Because I’m still under contract and didn’t have insurance on the phone, I’d have to pay full retail price.
Retail price on the cheapest phone he had was $140. Retail price on another Razr: $360. No thanks. Instead, I stole my wife’s Razr and had my phone number moved to it. Problem solved!
My website has been offline for the past week or so. For some reason, nobody outside of my local network could access it. I contacted my ISP and they searched diligently, but could find no fault in their system to explain it. They did find that all incoming network ports to my IP address were blocked.
I was a little perplexed by this, because I have made no network changes on my network that would explain this. After double checking all of my firewall settings, I thought I’d take a shot at a firmware upgrade on my router.
Surprise! That fixed it! I’m still not sure why upgraded firmware would fix a problem that seemingly appeared out of nowhere, but it’s working now, so that’s good enough for me.
We replaced our white carpeting (which wasn’t very white anymore after almost 4 years of our children) with new hardwood floors this weekend. A friend of ours does flooring installation for a living, so we hired him to do ours. I spent several hours trying to help him lay the wood, but I think I probably hindered more than helped.
The finished product looks terrific and we no longer have to worry about the kids staining the floor with dirt, food, drink, vomit, or any of that other great stuff that comes with kids.
For you Macbook users:
I had a really strange problem last night. The internal speakers on my MacBook Pro stopped working. When I went to sound prefs, it showed optical digital audio output was enabled. When looked into the head phone jack, I could see it emitting a red light, which I had never seen before. Somehow, the digital audio mechanism had been activated, even though I have never inserted a digital audio device.
The fix was really high-tech… I inserted and removed my headphones a couple times until the red light went off and my internal speakers started working again.
Weird.
Thank you to MacRumors.com for the fix.
