Checksum Arcanius

I guess two years is the lifespan of consumer electronics in my posession. Yesterday, during a tour of the UW‘s steam power plant (quite the contraption!), I pulled out my Canon Powershot S45, only to be dismayed by a cracked LCD screen. This means that the best part of digital photography — instant gratification — is now completely missing from the experience. Furthermore, without the LCD screen, the camera’s settings are unknowable and it becomes pretty much useless outside of the automatic setting. This means no more creative pictures like the one below, which has been one of my favorite uses of this camera. :-(

I have had the camera for almost exactly two years. In fact, I took my first picture with it on November 17, 2003.

On a related note, the enter key on my laptop keyboard started getting stuck halfway down last night. It wasn’t causing any troubles other than not feeling right, so I probably should have left it alone. Instead, I chose to pry it off and try to fix the problem. Well, about an hour later, I ended up with a broken enter key that is completely loose and falls off a lot that I have very little hope of fixing. Additionally, it sometimes becomes unseated and I have to reseat it before I am able to press enter again. While terribly annoying, I can live with this.

However, just moments ago, a new and more disturbing issue occured. I moved myself in order to get close to a power outlet so I could charge the battery on this bad boy. To do so, I closed the lid and sauntered on over to a table near the wall, then plugged in and reopened the lid… to find my laptop turned off. Not sleeping, not hibernating, but off. Pressing the power button did not revive it, and plugging in the AC adapter wasn’t making the ower LED come on. I checked the battery, which still had about 40% of the juice left, so that wasn’t the issue either. About 30 seconds later, however, the power LED came on and the computer started right up, as if nothing had happened. Clearly, however, there had been some major power glitch, which is not very reassuring.

It turns out that I have had this laptop for about two years as well. I won it in a raffle in Janurary 2004 — 23 months ago.

Here I am holding my new (silver) and old (blue) laptops. The “old” one I had purchased several months earlier — I don’t recall exactly when that was, but it was during Fry‘s grand opening, back in August-September 2003. Just for the record, the new laptop, which I am using now (defunct keyboard and all) is named Kleinoscope and the old laptop is named Mobius. Mobius is still in great working order; currently my mother uses it (it was a gift to her since she needed one and I didn’t need two). However, I will say that I have used Kleinoscope several orders of magnitude more — and used it harder — than anyone has used Mobius. I think it has served me well.

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