long story short, replacing just the screen wasn’t sufficient. the home key was still activating spuriously. I went back to the apple store and they finally gave me a new phone. I had only 22 days left on the warranty!

I got another appointment at a genius bar. after telling the long story, and heading him off at the pass when he started to tell me to reset it to factory defaults and not restore, he replaced the screen. I think the phantom home key presses are gone, but it might have happened during a phone call once, last night. we’ll see.

I dropped my iPhone on a sidewalk in December, shattering the screen. Apple sold me a new one for $200. After I restored my backup to the new phone, within a couple weeks the iPhone started pressing the home button by itself. That is, it would jump out of whatever app I was in, then jump back and forth between the first page of the home screen and the search page.

My experience with the iPad was surprising. Some of the things I expected to not care about turned out to be impressive, and some features I was excited about wound up as letdowns. Enough generalities, let me get down to details. First, I was prepared for heft after reading many comments castigating the mass of the iPad. I found the iPad to be just right! For its size, I think its weight speaks of solidity and perhaps even quality.

wrecked the bike today. Taking the ramp from 202W to 101N, I wasn’t paying attention. I saw slow traffic in front of me, then realized it was stopped, not slow, grabbed the front brake while still turning, and highsided. good thing I was wearing full gear. I still scraped my knee. my right hand is swollen, bruised, and sore. my left shoulder is very sore, along with both knees. Bike is totalled.

oh, I almost forgot something fairly important… my mercurial I installed in my home directory still works, and X11 apps I installed via fink (like gnucash and gnumeric) still work in Snow Leopard without having to recompile them. I suspect as long as the binaries you have were compiled with an x86 target at all, it will probably still run without recompiling, just in 32-bit mode.

I updated my macbook to Snow Leopard tonight. I went to run my little C-type sizeof program, and found out that I hadn’t recompiled it since I was running on a PPC. rosetta doesn’t install by default in Snow Leopard. so I went to re-compile it only to find out gcc had gone missing. all I had to do was install the new XCode on the Snow Leopard DVD, and then download the iphone SDK 3.

Got the bike out again, put gas in it, and took a little shakedown ride. Got to watch lightning all over the valley, in front of me all the way from the south to the north as I headed west from home. Fortunately all the rain was well to the west of me. Went and got cash, fish tacos, and a vanilla coke. I could tell I hadn’t ridden in a while!

I needed to write some code to find out my local machine’s IP address. I wanted to tell another machine my IP address so that other machine could open a socket connection back to my machine. A little googling turned up some sample code which works on both Linux and Mac OS X. Also I fiddled around with that code and condensed it down a bit.

Today marked the last fill-up on gas for the summer. I rode this tank out, and the ninja has been sitting in my garage with the low-fuel light flashing ever since. I’ve moved it into the driveway and back into the garage about twice just to keep the battery going. maybe I should look into a trickle charger for next summer.