Cautionary Tale

Bob went to the Missouri State Fair with John on Friday, then stayed out at John's for dinner that evening. I stopped at Sweet Tomatoes and had salad --

which reminds me of the last time I ate there. I had stopped on the way home to get a salad to go. It's a little cheaper than the regular price, since, obviously, you can't actually get "all you can eat," you can only get what will fit in a finite container.

I got just the salad container; you can also get a container for soup, and, I think, a pint container. I got up to the cashier and paid, and she got out a shopping bag for me. I said I'd just take it with me, that I didn't want to pack it up and put the lid on yet because I wanted to go back where the rest of the food (non-salads) to get a piece of bread.

She said, "Would you like a bakery bag?" and I thought, "How nice," and said, "Sure," and she gave me one and rang up 80 cents. I said, "Excuse me?" and she said that if I wanted bread, it cost another 80 cents. I said I had just been going to get a piece of sourdough bread, and that I had purposely left room in the salad plate for it, and when she just stood there looking at me, I gave her the 80 cents rather than cause a scene.

You better believe I filled up that bag with bread. For 80 cents, I should have gotten a whole loaf.

It didn't even occur to me that you couldn't put anything you wanted in your dish, but apparently you're only allowed to get salad. What difference that would make to anyone, I have no idea. The moral of this particular story is, in my opinion, keep your mouth shut, pay for your salad, then do whatever you want and see if someone actually walks up to you and berates you for taking a slice of bread.

-- and read my book, then went by Target and picked up a few groceries so I wouldn't have to do it on Saturday, then came home.

I watched the rest of Family Man (Nicolas Cage is one of my favorite actors, but what's the deal about marrying Lisa Marie Presley on the 25th anniversary of her father's death? Seemed just slightly bizarre.), then read part of an Asimov's Science Fiction magazine on my Visor, then decided to run a backup on the Visor. I do it whenever I think about it, but always on Saturdays, so I thought I might as well do it Friday night so I could check it off my list.

I took the combination modem/memory module out of the Visor, plugged in the backup module, ran the backup, took out the module, stuck the memory module back in, and . . . oops. The memory module wasn't being recognized. The modem was recognized, but it was as if it was a modem only, without the 8 MB memory. When I tried to look at the directory, I got a message that the memory module was "not present, or was not recognized."

After the momentary panic of removing it, blowing compressed air into the connections in case there was something wrong there, removing it, sticking it back in, removing it, sticking it back in (you know, just in case), I went to the web and looked up the manufacturer's site, didn't find anything useful, started looking at the newsgroups, and then just sat back and thought for a second about what I was doing right before the problem started, always a good tactic.

I'd been reading. I opened up WordSmith, which I'd been using to read the magazine, found the magazine still open in the application, closed it, clicked the menu button, and everything was fine and back to normal.

WordSmith is in the Visor's memory, and the magazine was on the memory module, so I was guessing that somehow when I took the memory module out, leaving the magazine still open, the connection between the two was lost . . . or something like that.

I was extremely relieved. Right about that time Bob walked in. We talked for a little while, then he went upstairs to the office and I went out to the living room to watch television and knit. I clicked through the channels and the only thing I could find to watch was an old rerun of The Cosby Show, so I watched that for awhile, and did a couple of rows on my vest, and at 11:30 precisely, the lights went out. Well, the lights and everything else electrical in the house. Just boom, everything went black.

I sat right where I was--like when you get lost, the best thing to do when the lights go out is just stay where you are and let someone come find you--until Bob came downstairs with a flashlight. He lit some candles, and we sat there in the dark for a little while, then figured we might as well go to bed. It was weird--so dark. It's usually not completely dark--there's a little nightlight with a blue bulb in the bathroom, but the bedroom was really dark without that little glow.

I was a little worried that the electricity would be off all night and we'd lose the food in the freezer, but Bob reassured me that it would last for several hours as long as I didn't open the door, but judging by the clocks in the morning, it was only off for about an hour and a half.

It rained overnight, and everything cooled off, and we had the windows open on Saturday. It was nice.

So that was Friday. Saturday was uneventful, mostly. I drove out to Lawrence to The Yarn Barn to get some wool to make a purse--a little Peruvian-inspired intarsia bag--and went to the library, and that was about it. On Sunday I did a little shopping for a friend's birthday and went to the grocery store, and sometime Sunday evening I sat down to read the rest of the Asimov's novelette that I had left unfinished.

When I tried to open it up in WordSmith, I got an error message that I didn't have enough memory. Well, I thought I probably did have enough memory, but I remembered that when you open up a large text document, it creates a comparably-sized temporary file, so I wasn't too worried about it, I just opened it up in Palm Reader, which I don't like quite as well, but it's fine.

I read for awhile, then got a "low battery" warning, so I turned the machine off, popped the old batteries out and put in some fresh ones, turned it back on, and . . . oops. Same old problem. The memory module isn't being recognized. For a second, I thought, oh, well at least I know how to solve this, then I realized that rather than using WordSmith, which was on the internal memory, I was using Palm Reader, which was on the memory module along with the magazine. And since the memory module wasn't recognized, I had no way to get to Palm Reader to close the document.

This time, it was just a little more serious, and I panicked just a little bit more.

I thought, well, I could reformat the module . . . but no, I can't get to the module at all, so I can't do anything to it. It's like it doesn't exist. There was absolutely nothing I could think of to do. I started looking for my documentation and serial number, thinking I might have to send the module in to the manufacturer to have it reformatted or replaced . . .

I wrote to customer service, and I posted messages in a bunch of newsgroups, and then sat back and thought again. Even though I knew I had had about a half meg of space left in the Visor's memory the last time I looked, it was showing that there was only about 50K free, which would indicate that although I had thought there would be no connection to anything on the handheld itself, since both the reader and the book were on the module, there must be some kind of file created on the handheld that was causing the problem.

I scrolled through the applications and files, but couldn't see anything obvious that I could delete, but it got me thinking. I'd done a back-up on Friday. I'd made some changes since then, but nothing major, just a shopping list and a few entries in my checkbook register.

My backup module is all or nothing, that is, I can't do an incremental or specific backup or restore, so I couldn't do another backup without copying the file that was causing the problem. So I took a deep breath and erased everything in the Visor's memory. I needed to do that anyway, at some point, just to check that the backup module was doing its job, so I had to have faith that it would work, and it did.

I stuck the backup module back in, pressed "Restore," and waited while it did its thing. Once it was finished, I took out the backup module, put the memory module in, and voila, everything was fine again. I had to recreate my shopping list, re-download a couple of knitting patterns, and re-enter some checks in the check register, but other than that, everything seemed okay.

So the moral of this story is: don't think you're being smart and saving time by leaving the book you're reading open. Close it, even if you're getting up for just a second, or risk dire consequences. If I hadn't had a recent back-up, or if I didn't have a back-up at all, I would have been in real trouble. I guess I could have erased the memory, then done a hot sync, but that's problematic, too, because rather than the desktop files being exactly what you have on the handheld, the desktop retains applications that you've removed from the handheld, and if you're doing a complete restore from the desktop, it will install things you no longer want, and, at least in my case the last time that happened, will have way more files than will fit on the handheld, thus causing more grief and work to go through and remove them from the desktop backup manually.

Oh, and also, that removing the batteries to replace them is the same as removing the module. I've gotten a little lax about turning stuff off, I think, since the advent of "plug and play" USB connections. If the mouse isn't working, just unplug it and plug it back in, and generally it will start working again. I would never have done that a few years ago. I guess it's worth getting back into the frame of mind of being careful that everything is closed before I do anything to the hardware.

At least I learned something.