Monday, December 9, 2013

On Magnetic Fields (or, how my electronic stuff decided to revolt en masse)

I read recently that the Earth's magnetic field is about to reverse polarity. The sun's field switches about every 11 years, but Earth is more like 800,000 years. I think I may be part of the proof that the ol' switcharoo is coming.

Had a bad week, digitally. It was one of those spans of time where electronics in general just seemed to not like me any more. It started out innocently enough when I noticed I had a couple of duplicate blog posts labeled as "Draft" -- so I deleted them. Only, what ended up being deleted was not the draft/duplicate post, but the original, including all of the comments.

Then my cell phone "died" during a firmware update. Apparently the phone was just finishing up installing an update and then it had some issues. It went from being a phone to being a paperweight. I took it in to the local Sprint store where they told me it was a "known issue" and that I was lucky because they were not going to charge me the $75 service fee. Wow! How "lucky"! And how generous they are...

I went to take some photos of the kids and the camera decided it needed to greatly underexpose the first 10 - 20 pictures I took. Then, magically, it started to behave. Yes, I changed some settings, but I gave up when it appeared that my changes weren't really making any difference. Then, suddenly, it just started working again. For the record, I've taken about 10k photos with that camera, so I know enough about the controls to know that something was not acting normal.

And then the name of my ebook on Amazon suddenly did not match the name of the print version, so Amazon started treating it as two separate books. I could understand if I had changed the name, or even if I had somehow typed it in incorrectly, but that was not the case when I entered the book into the Kindle Select program (which mandates that the names be the same).

Odd!

Here's hoping that I have gotten all of the digital weirdness out of my system. I'm looking at it like a test run for the magnetic field reversal -- like I'm in an early beta program.

No comments:

Post a Comment