No, that’s not some sort of funky new graphics program you’re seeing on my Palm. My Tungsten C gave up the ghost last night. It appears to be functioning properly… with the exception of that sickening blob of blackness on the right side of the screen rendering the rest of it unreadable. As far as I can tell, it looks like the LCD was somehow crushed, totally ruining the screen.
I’m not entirely sure when it happened. I know I got to church last night a little before 7PM, and everything was just fine. I was showing off the baby’s heartbeat sound clip I recorded earlier to whoever would listen. We then went out on our visitation assignments (Tuesday is when we perform our FAITH Sunday School visitations). Once we got back, I pulled out the Palm to let the pastor listen to the sound clip, and that’s when I found the crushed screen. I honestly can’t think of anything I could have done in the course of that hour or so that could have possibly damaged it that severely. Trust me, I’ve done far worse to this thing over the years, and it’s bounced back with hardly a twitch.
Fortunately, I synced the Palm earlier in the day to get the baby’s sound clip off, so all my data should be backed up. Hot on the heels of the previous month’s hard drive crash, I’m almost getting technologically paranoid. I have this sudden urge to backup every byte of data from every hard disk, floppy, CD, and DVD onto hardcopies–hardcopies–and bury it in the back yard. I’m just not sure where I’ll get the “rapid” wombats.
I’ve purchased a new Life Drive as a replacement through Circuit City (their prices were actually better than direct from Palm or from my beloved Best Buy). To be honest, I don’t know if this was the best choice or not. I wavered between the Life Drive, the TX, and the Treo 650. Actually, while the Treo was an early favorite, I couldn’t bring myself to purchase a new cell phone while my current el cheapo one is perfectly fine. The Life Drive just had more bells and whistles. We’re picking up the new device tonight and I’ll probably end up posting about it soon enough.
![[QR Code]](/myimages/jeffdotcom_qrcode.png)
For what it’s worth, I was visiting Arlington Cemetary in Washington DC a couple of weeks ago, and part of the display was on the buglers that play Taps there. See the website above if you’re interested (and there’s a sound bite or three also). Good luck on finding a replacement (and I hope you had the data backed up ok)…
— stjen (from the GPF forum)
(OK, so the URL I intended to mention got attached to my name on the post. Here it is in cleartext: http://tapsbugler.com There’s a lot of history there.