test2

...Or, Adventures of a Human Fuzzer (because geekosaur suggested it and it sounds better than 'Guys, I Think I Have Gremlins')

So, anyone who hangs around me for a long enough time knows that I love technology. But sometimes I love technology too long, or too hard, and then technology fails to love me back. Which is a nice way of saying I am really good at breaking things through either clumsiness or aforementioned human fuzzer status. The last few weeks have been grand adventurse in new and exciting ways of breaking technology, which are best summed up as bulletpoints, because otherwise I'll be writing all day.

The Laptop
- Buy more RAM for the laptop, because 2GB isn't cutting it
- Decide, well, if I'm going to do more RAM, I should sit and wipe my Win7 install, too, because I never use it, and having my storage partitions split up is a pain
- Make USB boot key of PartedMagic! Get into it successfully! Hooray!
- ...delete the wrong NTFS partition: the storage instead of the Windows one
- realize that while it was mostly just a download dump, I had ALL my photos from the con on there (along with some nice photos I took in lab)
- spend roughly three hours trying to run partition recovery via Testdisk, guided by the very patient sophie
- Finally give up, accept that I have a better chance of running file recovery on the camera's memory card for the con photos, and that the rest is write-off
- Go to clean up the other partitions, because dual-booting Win7 means having really messed up boot set-ups because Windows Updater eats other bootloaders
- ACCIDENTALLY DELETE THE PARTITION WITH MY KERNEL ON IT
- Bang head against metaphorical wall and wail at the wonderful denizens of #dw for a short while
- Go to reinstall my root file system, being very thankful /home was on a separate partition
- ...Install 32-bit Ubuntu on 64-bit machine, causing it to only recognize 2.4GB of my nice shiny 4GB of RAM
- Facepalm
- Reinstall 64-bit OS and reconfig files.
- It is now six am.

The Tower
- Tower fails to boot. Again. (this is a fairly regular occurrence)
- Decide to actually play with boot settings instead of just reinstalling OS like I usually do.
- Get boot to work!
- Give in to the nag window to upgrade to 11.04, thinking 'it should be fine now, right?'
- Upgrade!
- Tower fails to boot again :| (this has happened every time I try 11.04 on any of my machines, I think it's cursed)
- Sigh, reinstall 10.10, decide I will work out why boot keeps failing on the main disk another night.

The Nook
- Fail to write the disk images needed to root the Nook repeatedly
- Disk image writer attempts to summon elder gods
- Fail some more.
- Finally succeed! Nook is rooted.

The Razr
- Get shiny new phone!
- Discover rooting shiny new phone is surprisingly easy!
- Gleefully start deleting Motorola and provider apps I don't need
- Discover the hard way that BlurEmailEngine.apk? Controls display text message notifs
- Oh, and BlurEmail.apk is necessary for contacts to works. Thanks, Motorola.
- Try factory reset. Accomplish nothing other than deleting all my apps.
- Attempt to reinstall system apps from other people's dumps. Fail.
- Attempt to install Brazilian stock ROM, because nobody bothers ripping the Canadian ones. Also fail.
- Give in, find replacement apps (to the good people behind the GO suite? I love you)

...and there has been some shenanigans with both my camera memory card and J's camera memory card, but file recovery ran okay and format worked, so those aren't worth writing up. And this is why I don't have con photos up yet.