Been a strange couple of weeks and, well, yeah, I've been offline for a bit.

Pretty much put the gift bow on the three titles that shipped with my team's tech in them - haven't heard of any problems, issues, or worries since launch... next blip on the radar is Christmas week, but that looks like it will be a no-op as well. I love it when you can set up software and it goes off on its own.

What didn't get set up on it's own and go is the Saga that has been driven by my new hard drive. I recently decided that I wanted some more storage room for media - particularly video - since I've been putting more and more stuff onto my 80GB Zune. So popped over to Newegg and picked up a 1TB drive on the cheap. When it came in, I popped it into the machine, plugged in the thin SATA cable into a red port on the motherboard: BIOS doesn't see the drive. Switch from AHCI to IDE - BIOS saw it but the name was mangled. Updated the BIOS. Machine won't boot. Monitor shows that it's getting a signal but it won't get to a BIOS POST screen. Tried some things: discovered that my Microsoft BT keyboard is the blocker. Grabbed a USB keyboard, machine started to boot again. Back to the drive - still boned. OK, fine: sent the drive back. Got a new drive. Same results. Tried different power cables, different SATA cables, banged my head into a wall a few times.

As it turns out I have six SATA ports: four are red, two are black. The red ports are Masters - the black ones are Slaves. I noticed that I had plugged my DVD drive into one of the black ports... then I dimly remembered that I had this exact problem with the DVD drive, over a year ago... maybe I hit my head too hard after all. What doesn't make sense is why I can't use the four red ports for... well, anything except for one boot drive. Asus hasn't answered that forum post yet, but after getting this far, I had a new 1TB D: drive.

So I moved my Video's folder to the D: drive. Permissions now became the problem, but I've posted about that before - applied knowledge and all that. After that, Zune lost all of my videos... OK, I wipe out the Zune library data and re-install. Now I can see my videos on the D: drive - yay! And that's when I notice that the 360 can't see the Zune PC anymore.

Now I do a clean sweep of Zune: directories and registry crap. Find where my 360 sharing information is in the Registry and blow that away. Rebuilt everything: Zune has my videos, 360's can see the machine, video and music play - everything is working! ...until I plug in my 80GB Zune for sync-ing.

I'm not entirely sure why that stopped working but what I know right now is that it's still down. I can get one good sync out of the device before it stop responding to any attempts to sync... including my notebook where I have my Shuffle By Album project, that I can't load onto the Zune now. Not. At all. Happy.

In fact if Apple made a HDD based player with a decent screen size - or if my PSP had a HDD option - I would be dropping the thing, just out of spite. Yes, I'm really that annoyed by this.

In the middle of all of this, I repaved my old Dash and gave it to Jolene, since her phone was rebooting itself whenever it got a call. She's been impressed with what the phone can do - as I've said many times, it does more than my iPhone - but the more she uses it, the more I remember about what I had to tweak to make it really usable. Like remapping the T-Mobile button to the Task Manager [so you can close apps, particularly the memory sucking HTC camera app] or setting up the ever unpredictable EDGE server... just a bunch of nitpick things but things that made the phone really nice. And stuff that I haven't done for my iPhone. What's even stranger to me is that after the Smartphone hit 5.0, I didn't have to install many apps, if any. Meanwhile, my iPhone has about 25 apps that I've downloads - no idea why that is... I used both phones the same amount of time and both made it fairly easy to download new apps - why do I need 25 apps for the iPhone? Is it to plug holes in the built-in functionality? No idea...

Speaking of iPhones, I finally went into a store to talk to customer service about the flaking AT&T behavior. Not so much that I drop calls or have poor signal - more that I'll get Voicemail without ever hearing the phone ring. It's like the call never happened yet I have a Voicemail. I don't have Push mail turned on, I sometimes leave it on 3G - it shouldn't be a line conflict. The CSR at Apple ran some diagnostics on the hardware and pronounced it happy. Mentioned that AT&T was having signal problems over the last few days - I told him it's happened since launch.

He then told me that I should do two things: first get a new SIM from AT&T. When I pushed on this, he told me it was free and it could help. Confused me, since I don't see what SIM cards have to do with reception... true not all SIM cards are the same (I remember that one Nextel phone had a SIM that simply didn't work with any other phone) but they usually just grown their memory size every couple of years, and that's it. So I went to an AT&T store and asked them for a new SIM. CSR there didn't even blink an eye; I asked her if this was a normal request - she said that yes, Apple has been telling a lot of people to get a fresh SIM, but didn't know why. Free "upgrade" and a quick thing - yay. The second thing the Apple CSR had me do was re-pave the phone. Restore the 2.2 firmware and do not restore a backup. I did this - and lost some ebooks and notes, which stung quite a lot - and so far, the phone has been happy. Very happy. Like coverage at my workplace happy. Could be a placebo fix, but it feels like something got fixed...

Happy belated Thanksgiving. Was up at the 'goat farm for some bird and treats - part of the offline experiment the last few days.

And yes, I also said cookies - I put my tree up on Thanksgiving this year and did my holiday baking this past weekend... good to get the domestic bug out of my system early... back to grilling in the rain, where I can add value.

Oh, and I got a Bluetrack Explorer Mouse - still unsure if I'm going to give up my trackball for it, but so far, it's full of win.