It all began to make sense. The first time I noticed there was a problem was in the pitch black of the bedroom after not being able to fall asleep. Thinking I’d listen to a podcast or two while laying in bed, I grabbed the phone from the headboard and pushed the headphones into place. Or at least I made the attempt. There must have been a piece of pocket lint just inside the headphone jack which was promptly shoved further in and compacted by my fumbling nocturnal efforts.

After removing the lint we had to test that everything was working properly. Since I didn’t have any headphones with me the Genius pulled out his own personal pair to test with and double-tapped the home button to play the most recent audio file. He gave a very abrupt “Uh… it’s working.” and stopped playing the file. It was only later that I found out that the file that had started playing was an old episode of The Dawn and Drew Show podcast, the intro to which sounds like this. I can only imagine what that poor guy was thinking.

Lesson learned: always shine a light into a problematic hole and assess the situation.

In other news, I can’t wait for this kind of weather to return:

Taken while driving back to St. Louis on I-70 E.

On a related note, I find myself turning down apartment choices based on what kind of Internet service they are able to get. I’d really like to stick with AT&T’s U-verse, so the hunt continues.

I’m feeling the itch again, this time because the various little beta bugs and incompatibilities of Windows 7 are starting to get to me; while most software seems to function well under this operating system, a small amount of them that I use on a regular basis (ex: TightVNC) don’t seem to run as well as they did on XP. As a result I’m seriously considering switching things up again (and the fact that Windows 7 isn’t due until late 2009 doesn’t help), but for some reason find myself being drawn to a Linux install once more.

I like the nerd-factor of running Linux, and I’m definitely more comfortable with it now than I ever was in the past. Most likely the fascination will last all of a week at which point I will probably drag myself back to XP once more… We’ll see how things develop.

I haven’t read the books, but I think Matt wants me to.

Needless to say I was amazed when following these instructions actually solved my problem. There is a lot of potential for this, but I really, really hope it doesn’t turn into worthless “Did this solution work for you?” troubleshooter. It’s nice to see the built-in help show some hint of intelligence.