Happy Friday the Thirteenth!

Happy Friday the Thirteenth!

Well, this has been a bad week for electronics as far as I'm concerned.

My TV is still in the process of dying.

My TiVo bought the big one on Sunday. I finally got it to the UPS store and got it on it's way back to TiVo. Once they get it, they'll send me a new one (or maybe a newer one, or at least one that works). So, with any luck, they'll get it Tuesday, and if they get it out to me the same day, I might have one as soon as next Friday.

In the meantime, I spent most of the day on Monday on the bus to go to the Comcast office and get a DVR until the TiVo comes back. That's kind of like taking your top-of-the-line sports car to be serviced and have them loan you a tractor to get around on. But at least it's possible to watch TV in the meantime. I'm particularly looking forward to the Doctor Who episode tomorrow because it's written by Neil Gaiman! Here's a publicity photo:

Last Saturday, before all this started, I ordered a Samsung Galaxy Tab from T-Mobile. It arrived yesterday, and I did something stupid and didn't know how to operate it. I can't believe I did something so dumb! I thought it wasn't working, and returned it yesterday (while I was dropping off the TiVo at UPS). They overnighted a replacement, and it arrived completely charged up late this morning.

The new one was completely charged up when I got it late this morning, so I spent about 5 hours having fun with it! Then it said the battery was low, so I unpacked the charger and cord from the box and plugged the whole thing into the wall. A few minutes later, it wasn't working. I finally got it to light up and try to tell me what's wrong, and it did. It said to connect the charger.

I tried plugging it into a different outlet, I tried plugging the USB cable into my computer's USB port, and it didn't seem to be working. I finally decided to just plug it into the wall and just leave it for a while to see what would happen. It looks like it's charging now, but very slowly. I'll check it in a bit and see if there's any difference.

I have to say that it is absolutely excellent when it's working! It loads web pages very quickly (faster than my computer), and it plays videos beautifully. It came with some apps I'd never seen before, and there's at least one that I really like. I don't remember the name and I don't want to interrupt it while it's charging, but the app is called something like daily status. It's got five pages, and once you tell it where you live, when you open it, the first page tells you what your local weather is. You can also load other locations, and see what the weather is like there. I already loaded in a location for my sister in New Jersey, and one for John, in California, so I can see what the weather is like there. I still have to load some other locations. But I've got Friendship, MD loaded, so I can see what the weather is like at the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival.

The fifth page shows you what you have scheduled on your Google calendar. The other pages show stock quotes if you enter your stocks in them, and some other stuff that I'm not interested in, but those two pages are worth their weight in gold (not that they actually weigh anything, you understand, being virtual).

It comes with the Kindle app already installed, and I installed the Nook app, and it seems to run even better than it did on my G1. All the books I've already bought showed up right away, and I had to make the text smaller because it was trying to display it at the same text to screen size ratio as my G1, and since this screen is much bigger, so was the type. But that's easily adjusted.


There's a Gallery app, and I opened it, thinking that I'd have to figure out how to load photos, and discovered that a lot of my photos had already loaded!

This is a really great device!

The people at the local T-Mobile store said that I could bring it in, and they'd use a cord that they have in the store to check and see if it was the cord. They have a car charger with a cord like the one I have, but it has a plug that attaches that will fit into a cigarette lighter that I can buy if that's the problem.

Or maybe it'll just charge?

I'm hoping.

It finally seems to be charging now.

Maybe it's OK.

As mentioned, my TV is still dying. Almost a year ago, it acquired a faint green cast to the color. You can't see it a lot of the time, but when there's a shot in low light, instead of being mostly shades of grey, it's more like shades of olive drab. It's been slowly getting worse. I've had it connected to two TiVos and now the DVR, and it's not from them.

Then there's the buzz that's developed whenever it's on. Oh, and don't forget the two thin, staticky lines that slowly travel up the screen all the time. I've been too distracted by the other things I've been dealing with to do something about that. I don't have any money saved, so if I want to do something about it now, it'll require going into debt, which I'm reluctant to do.

I feel like I'm just whining now, so I'll stop, although I will say that if there's a day that people should be entitled to whine, it would have to be Friday the 13th!

I hope yours was spectacular, and that your weekend is the best that it can be!

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