Crosswalks to Nowhere

This year's excursion to Arlington Heights' Frontier Days was a short one for us. Becky had already gone during the day today, and we were all a bit tired, but Lisa and Emma decided to take on the very cool Matterhorn.

While playing the games, Emma won a bear dressed like a wizard and a little fuzzy orange critter, and Becky won a huge inflatable lollipop.

I had my annual monster bag of cotton candy. Yum.

And so the holiday week begins!

The 4th of July was a full day, starting with the annual Arlington Heights Parade and ending with fireworks in Rolling Meadows. And yes, the one shown above was a really cool one that exploded into a smiley face...

In the middle of it all, we did 18 holes at Twin Links, which will be closing permanently at the end of the season. Here's Emma right after she sunk one.

We also celebrated Lisa's birthday, complete with a tiara and a pink cake. Talk about the complete package..

Happy Fourth of July!

These two guys are running for office. And they're both dead.

Okay, I'm kidding: the guys mentioned on these posters are very much alive, but I thought it was pretty funny to see these on a corner in Scottsdale.

We just got back from our annual trip to Arizona, and of course we had a great time. Lots of lounging by the pool and just hanging out, which is a nice change of pace. We made our traditional visit to Islands Restaurant, and we enjoyed Aunt Barbara's famous thin-crust pizza.

The kids and I met with some podcasting friends, Aaron and Jenny from The Big Show, and we were on their show, too. We had dinner at a local restaurant called San Tan Flat, which was very good and very cool-- a real Arizona/cowboy experience.

And I am succumbing to peer pressure by posting this photo of me in my Rex Kwon Do getup.

It was a great, relaxing few days in the Arizona sun!

This morning, Emma participated in one of the Apple Store's Apple Camps. These are very cool events where kids 13 and under spend a few hours learning how to make a Podcast or Song (using GarageBand), a web site (using iWeb), or a movie (with iMovie and iDVD).

Emma and some new friends made a movie called "iDrop," the centerpiece of which was Emma throwing an iPod on the nice maple floors of the Apple Store. Fortunately, the kids were given a dead iPod to use as a prop, but I didn't find out about it until well after the movie was shown to the group.

I learned from some of the other parents that these are annual events at the store, so I think we may be back next year-- perhaps for a class that won't involve props.

Emma had a great time, and I learned what a peaceful place Woodfield is at 9:00 am on a Wednesday morning.

We visited Lisa's parents at their new home in Indiana this past weekend. Here's Emma having her first experience with a lawn tractor. :-)

Today's Red Eye had an article about iPods and the fact that a lot of them are dying. Okay, it's not exactly deep journalism, but it's interesting to see other people's experiences with these little boxes.

MEGO warning: geekiness follows.

Last fall, I got tired of my 3rd generation 15 GB iPod dying after about an 90 minutes of play, so I figured I had little to lose by opening it up and replacing the battery. I bought this kit from Other World Computing which includes a higher-capacity battery and the tools and instructions for opening the iPod. Here is my original posting on the topic.

I'm pleased to report that the battery life has been stellar ever since I installed it. My confidence level was high enough that a couple months later I replaced the battery in Lisa's iPod Mini. Now she's a happy camper.

All that said, a few weeks ago I started having more problems with my iPod. The main problem was that when I would try to update the songs on the unit, the update process would freeze in the middle of uploading a song. iTunes said it was updating and the iPod had the "Do Not Disconnect" message on the screen. At one point, I left it for over an hour and nothing budged. One thing I noticed, though: the unit became hot.

I assumed I had a hardware failure, so I went on the web in search of some iPod diagnostics help.

Of course, the first thing I found was Apple's suggested reset procedure. This seemed to bring the iPod back to life, but when I connected it to my MacBook to update it, the same thing happened again.

After another reset, I attempted to restore the iPod by running the iPod Updater. The problem here was that the unit seemed to have gone into a state where nothing would recognize it, even as an attached disk drive. I tried this on both my Mac and my PC.

Finally, after letting it sit for a while and letting the battery drain, I plugged it back into my Mac. This time it recognized the iPod as an external disk drive. I went into Disk Utility, and against everything I've read online, formatted the iPod as a plain external drive. That worked, and I disconnected it.

Strangely enough, when I reconnected it, the Mac recognized it as an iPod and asked if I wanted to run iPod Updater. I did, and my iPod was back as an iPod.

I started to download songs to the unit from iTunes and, of course, the copy process froze again just like before. Another reset and it was back to square one-- an iPod that looks like it should work, but hangs on loading songs.

Back on the web, I found this page, which tells you how to put the iPod into a diagnostic mode. I ran all the tests on the page and came up with no errors.

Then I found Scott Hanselman's excellent page on how to run a disk check on the iPod. I ran the test, and restored the iPod again.

Suddenly, the problem seems to have gone away.

I'm not convinced that the problem is gone-- my gut is telling me I have a hard drive that's about to die, so we'll see what happens. In the meantime, I'm switching off between the iPod and my Shuffle.

I figured I would post this so all the links to these sites would be in one place-- if you found this helpful, you're welcome.