The House That Silence Built

On the drive back from New York City Sunday afternoon, Hex the iPod died an inglorious death. None of the tricks I've learned were able to revive him, and nothing on Apple's website worked either. So today I turned to the service plan that I bought with Hex, back in November of 2006.

Except it transpires that the plan had to be activated within Hex's one year warranty. I'm 90% positive the salesman failed to mention that particular fact, but it was over a year ago, so I can't be certain. So I get on the phone with Apple, and after some dinking around in their automated troubleshooting system, I get shunted to a real live person with a real live difficult to understand accent. Some time spent on hold later, I'm told that I have to fax them the service plan card and original receipt -- what exactly this will accomplish, I have just realized I don't know. But anyway, I was foresighted enough to retain the receipt, since I figured something would eventually go catastrophically wrong with Hex, as things are wont to do with iPods. And besides, if I had activated the plan as it was meant to be, Hex still would be covered by it.

So now all I have to do is fax or e-mail the documents. Too bad I don't have a fax or a scanner -- or the ability to ignore my Yankee thriftiness and pay four dollars for a fax at the local UPS Store. Instead, though, I call up momiji_k, She of the Countless Disused Electronic Devices. I discover she hasn't got a scanner that I can use -- hers is one of the earliest models, from IBM and probably uses a serial cable -- but she does have a fax machine that the previous owners of her home left in the basement -- sometime in the mid-90s, by the look of the thing. She doesn't know if it works, but I'm welcome to find out.

At this juncture, I have a fax machine and documents to fax. I even do up a cover sheet from http://www.freefaxcoversheets.net/. I'm not kidding. Such a website exists. Now we're really cooking with dragonfire. Over at my mom's, I hook the machine up to the phone line. It turns on, which is good, and appears to transmit. The only drawback is you have to feed the sheets one at a time and the rollers seem to need two sheets of paper to grip properly. I wound up making two transmissions, the first one being slightly bungled, but hopefully all the documents got there in the end. I'll find out in four to five days when I get to call Apple again.

I really want hats to come back. Real, proper hats: fedoras, homburgs, porkpies, bowlers, what have you.

I love reading the discussion pages on Wikipedia. They really do blow up small things beyond all proportion, like in the discussion of a paragraph about Stargate SG-1:

There seems to be a consensus of sorts emerging in weak support of including Canada in the phrase. To that end, and in consideration of the other articles in the Canadian TV Shows category, I propose the following.

The current phrase is as follows:

It begins one year after the events of the 1994 science fiction film Stargate. It was produced in and around Vancouver, Canada.

I propose that it be changed to say:

It begins one year after the events of the 1994 science fiction film Stargate and was produced in the Vancouver area of British Columbia, Canada.

Could I request an informal straw poll to establish an actual consensus that we could cite? =David^(talk)_(contribs) 22:05, 28 July 2007 (UTC)

( Knitty witterings within. )

Don't give me that look. I hardly ever picspam. ( Further in. )