Fear and Loathing in Indianapolis

Posted by Aaron Springer on July 20, 2010 under Technology | Read the First Comment

So, this week was supposed to be relaxing. Last week, as some of you may know, both my son and daughter were with us. This is an unusual thing for several reasons. First, my son normally spends a night or two with us, not four, and second, my daughter was here as well. I will hand it to Young Springer (my daughter) that she dealt with Younger Springer (my son) quite well. In fact, she was the best big sister a parent could hope for. Still, it was stressful, as Younger Springer is headstrong and willful, doesn’t listen as well as Papa would like, and is, well, three years old.

Add to other issues, and you end up with one very stressed out Dad.

Well, it all went okay. Younger’s mom had a great trip, came back tired and knowledgeable, and no one was injured or killed. I call that a success.

So, to reward Young Springer and myself, we broke out the Big Lego™ Collection, two bins both of which are difficult to carry, dumped them out on a durable quilt on the living room floor, and have spent the last two days building. Yay!

This morning, I got up to load a thumb drive with the day’s viewing entertainment, and found that my seven month old cordless trackball had stopped working. I assumed it was batteries, so I swapped them. No dice. Then I realized that my computer had frozen. That’s a rare occurrence, and I have been known to leave it running for days or weeks at a time without an issue. Ah well, I thought, I’ll just reboot.

The computer came up quite faithfully. The trackball, however, did not.

Now, this is the second trackball of this type I have owned. The first also failed in a similar fashion, but my parents had just purchased me a new one for my laptop for Christmas, so I moved it over to the desktop and promptly stopped worrying about it. Now I had a similar issue. This time, however, it turned out to be the receiver. I think I have a backup somewhere…

My eyes darted to the balcony overlooking the lake and I had a very dark thought of my trackball sinking into the water with me dancing gleefully in satisfied rage. I shook the images from my head, and began the process of troubleshooting.

The receiver did not work on the 32-bit version of XP, nor Ubuntu, nor Vista. By this point, I knew it was toast. So, seeking solace, I went to the ********* website to look at warranty repair. 3-year warranty, yes!

However, the website does not have a formal warranty repair request… instead, you have to submit a question and wait… so, I am waiting.

It is odd to be without my trackball. I have attached a cordless mouse that I bought for my laptop, but it is just not the same. *sigh*