If this was a glass was seen by some as half empty and others as half full, my glass has been thrown off a balcony for all the see as broken...

Boom. Baboom. Baboom baboom baboom! Anything and everything computer related has had an issue lately - I would swear that I could even crash a white board these days - except for my notebook. Which is odd since that is usually a troublemaker.

Usually my stints with Bad Geek Karma come on fast, last for a couple of days, and then quickly disappear without warning. This stretch was odd... it would complicate a day, then sorta go quiet, and then come back the next day. It's been this way for a the last six or seven days.

Today was evil. All three of my work machines felt like they had their Turbo Mode turned off [if you don't know what I mean by this, you were born in the 80s or later and I refuse to comment further.] Laggy, sluggish, painfully so. The network was ass too. While trying to run automation tests I had to up every timeout I had by 100%, just to do any work. And even that was painful, seeing as it took the last 48 hours to get a machine configured "properly" for testing... and because every test usually takes 35 minutes - today it was over an hour per test - I was only to test a little bit by the end of the day.

Once I got the machine set up, that's when the automation testing turned on me. Things that used to run fine, crashed inexplicably. Test plans that had every test case and scenario passed but because the testing platform had an error, the whole thing failed. New timing issues that weren't an issue before... I ended up having to test the testing script, rather than the project I'm supposed to be testing. Sad.

Even SharpMT has been biting at my ankles, as I port it over to Whidbey. I was using threads to call static functions that used a static field to reference my main object, so that I could call methods on the main object. A bit circular, but it has always worked well in C++ - it was effective in C#, as well. Let the blocking 'net calls run in threads and still update the UI without having to pass around the world. That doesn't work anymore. Of course, the new implementation of the 'net functions in .NET support callbacks, so the whole thing is moot. Needs a re-write, but it's moot. Worse.

Oh, and I got my MPx200 back from the repair center at Motorola today. From day one, I had issues with the hands free kit... every mono headset I tried would drop calls after two minutes. Between two and three minutes, without fail. Only the stereo headset that Motorola included would work, and since a stereo headset isn't safe to drive with, that sucked too. So I cut off an ear bug, making it mono; that worked fine until the headset broke. But I didn't send it back just for that. See, a number of first run MPx200's have known to have SIM Failures from time to time. It's complained about on a few sites by users that have had this issue. It started for me around the Fourth of July. I sent it in on the 10th; they got it on the 14th. They returned it on the 26th; I got it on the 28th.

"Cannot duplicate problem" was the official response. Are you fuckin' kidding me? They didn't touch it. No repairs. No replacement. Nothing. I call someone with the hands free kit; drops after 2 minutes, 15 seconds. I open the SIM Manager; *dwiddle-doo*, SIM Failure. Are you fuckin' kidding me?

And so I had to call Motorola technical support. Again. And they agreed to take it in for repair, again. Even though I included steps to duplicate the problems the first time, the CSR was concerned about it, so she took them down again and I included a new copy of instructions in the return box. While this wasn't quite on par with me sending Apple a faulty PowerBook that overheated and Apple returning it with a statement that my iBook didn't hang during DVD playback... it's somehow more annoying. I'll be without the phone for a total of a month, I'm sure.

My home computer has been OK, but since it does little more than just collect email, it should be behaving. Of course it was connected to the iTunes reload, but I can't fault hardware for that. It's just waiting to crash on me, I'm sure. Oh. I forgot. I swapped out a 256MB DIMM for a new 512MB DIMM in the ThinkPad - the first one caused massive BSoD issues, so I had to exchanged it for another one which is working OK... I had forgotten that.

Makes me wonder if the local Indian casinos need a craps dealer...