Student Holds His Breath for PDA
By Knightbird, EUGLUG Times Staff Writer
EUGENE -- Joseph's PDA hovered between life and death Thursday, under
heavy sedation and operating without battery power, as surgeons waited to
assess the effects of a massive slider mechanism failure.
Joseph may attempt today to bring the 3-year-old PDA out of a battery-
disconnection-induced coma, into which it was placed following nearly
eighty minutes of intensive and delicate attempts to figure out how to get
the damned thing apart without a large hammer.
Only when the PDA is restored to consciousness, Joseph said, will the
effects of the sporadic and random digitizer input the electronic gadget
suffered Thursday evening become clear. Such component failures are often
fatal.
The Tungsten has been a powerful component in Joseph's life for years, and
its sudden and inexplicable digital crisis plunged the technology user
into a state of grief and anxiety. On wireless base stations, in the
kitchen, and before the giant window covered with light-reducing white
foamcore, Joseph wept, commiserated, and prayed that fiddling with those
little tiny connectors on the inside that he could barely even see and
tightening the tension on the leaf-spring guiding the movement of the
PDA's slider would correct the digitizer problems.
"The Last Backup," said an identification headline in the file added to
Joseph's most frequently accessed data location, his home directory on his
Mac.
In a powerful symbolic statement of the Tungsten's sudden absence from
Joseph's life, Joseph went for a walk to steady his nerves and his hands
prior to the surgery, pointedly leaving his PDA pocket empty.
Initial tests indicate that the PDA may make a complete recovery, but
Joseph warns that it is still too early to tell. "Look, either this fixes
it, or my Tungsten is hosed. We honestly didn't expect the device to
survive the surgery," Joseph said. "Some of those parts in there are
literally the size of an ant, and I couldn't even tell by sight which end
of the screws had the screwhead. We'll know tomorrow."
EUGLUG Special Correspondant Yumi Macintosh contributed to this report.
--
"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act,
but a habit."
-- Aristotle
_______________________________________________
EUGLUG mailing list
[email protected]
http://www.euglug.org/mailman/listinfo/euglug
