Soaked

I finally received my Wii via UPS -- weeks after having sent it in for repair. Of course, it was sent only moments after having waited weeks for it to return from repair the first time. So this was my second re-union, my third union, with the Wii. Shall third time be the charm?

I was pleasantly surprised to find my Wii shop channel information was migrated to the new system; initially I was told I'd have to negotiate that over the phone after having received the system. A couple of game saves were migrated to the new system, sadly not all of them. The console name and the Internet connection made it over. Everything else appears to be gone. Not much worse for wear.

A few minutes into my re-exploration of the Wii, a familiar error surfaced--one I'd seen before after receiving my system complete with corrupt memory. An error message that, coupled with messages regarding said corruption, lead to my system spending more time with UPS than with me in the last several months. I attempt to use the weather or news channels, and this is what I see:

Your Wii Connect24 is currently turned off, please confirm settings in the Wii options.

WiiConnect24 was not turned off. So I turned it off. At least after turning it off, when I'd try the weather or news channels, I'd get an error code with the above message. Turn on the WiiConnect24, the error code goes away. Error message stays.

I got on the phone with Nintendo and the outlook was bad. We were pretty sure the system was going to be on a trip to Nintendo very soon . . . after all, the final trouble shooting option the tech could find seemed pretty stupid. It didn't seem like it would work at all. My wife, listening in on the phone call, mumbled "he's bullshitting" -- she's an IT, she bullshits all the time. But I ignored her and we tried it. I sent message from my Wii to my e-mail then sent a message from my e-mail to my Wii. Yep. Just sent a stupid little e-mail to myself. It was the magical reminder WiiConnect24 needed that it was alive and well.

Scouring the net, this problem seems to be not uncommon . . . should you find WiiConnect24 thinking it's not on when it is . . . send yourself a little note.

It looks like I might actually get to play with this, my third try at the Wii, for at least a little while. I hope this is the one. I'm really sick of all my Wii time being spent tracking orders with UPS.

For Christmas, my wife got me a Wii. Of the fifteen pre-orders the local FYE issued, only 3 people received consoles. I was fortunate enough to be one of them. Early bird catches the worm, as they say. Unfortunately, last month the disc drive suddenly failed. My Wii lost its ability to eject discs. I call Nintendo, put in a repair order, wait for the UPS shipping label and send the Wii to Nintendo.

Weeks later it arrives on my door step -- the side panels I'd forgotten to return to it prior to shipping were replaced with brand new ones, Legend of Zelda Twilight Princess was removed from the drive and in a paper sleeve and everything just looked shiny and brand new. I hook the system up, excited about two things--the new Paper Mario game and the updated Opera based Internet Channel.

After letting the system update, I downloaded the Internet channel -- and was impressed with a number of fixes/changes with the Wii implementation of Opera. I was having several problems with cookies though--particularly on websites that hadn't been problematic with the old one. A problem I'd later come to learn wasn't likely caused by Opera . . .

Continuing to fiddle with the various channels, I ran into some other problems--VC games that wouldn't load properly, and then the weather channel that wouldn't work at all. Rather, it spit out some sort of corrupt memory error. I go into data management to try to back up save files, only to find that almost all of my save files "cannot be copied". So much for backing up. Fortunately a handful of saves, particularly the ones I was most concerned about, did let me back them up--Zelda, Red Steel, maybe Elebits too.

It wasn't an ideal solution, but I reformatted the Wii. I was desperately trying to fix it myself, anything to not have to send it back in. I -just- got it back after at least a month without it. But, alas, it looks like I'm giving it up again. After resorting to calling Nintendo my worst fears are confirmed--they want it sent in. Furthermore, this problem is a bigger one than the last one--and I was warned that it would take some more phone time to get someone to transfer my shopping channel data over to the system once repaired as it'll either be fully replaced or have the memory replaced--either way, my link to the shopping channel is lost.

So back to Nintendo my Wii goes . . . this is the first time I've ever had so much hardware trouble with a system from Nintendo. I've always heralded their hardware, but of course no manufacturing run is perfect. They're really good about repairing things and the support staff was knowledgeable, friendly and easy to get in touch with. At the end of the day, I'm just out some Wii time. Everything is coming out of their pockets--and they're throwing in a Classic Controller for my trouble.

Here's to hoping my Wii is better, not worse, when I get it back this time.

Plenty of us, myself included, love Gmail and depend upon it daily as our primary means of e-mail communication. It is arguably the best web based e-mail solution out there--some would even argue it is superior to any client-side e-mail solutions. Sure it lacks some of the advanced features, but when it comes to a balance of speed and utility, Gmail is a powerful thing indeed.

All this Gmail love aside, Gmail is in fact a beta -- and I suppose it's fair to say any problems we run into while using it is our own fault for putting so many eggs in a basket that comes without guarantee. It's arguably a great point of convenience for Google, as well. "There's a problem? Not our problem -- it's a beta." How many years was ICQ in beta for the sole reason of disclaiming any problems that may arise--avoiding any legal issues that may popup up with in the new rapid-communication field. Is that why Gmail has been in beta so long, as a cop out? Maybe. But the bottom line is . . . it's beta.

I say this in light of a recent "Oh Shit" over at "Google Blogscoped". An unfortunate user found himself mysteriously locked out of his account. Later, he was disheartened to learn his account had been deleted. Later still, his hopes were crushed when Google stated matter-of-factly:

We have investigated this issue, but because the results were inconclusive, we're not able to provide further assistance.

Gmail takes the privacy and security of our users very seriously. For this reason, we can't reveal any further information about this account.

There are those who say tough, google is beta; there are others who doubt the word of this user who would dare say something short of "Gmail is likened unto God!"; there are some who are sympathetic; there are those who have been through this exact same thing. I am the latter. About a year ago, this very thing happened to me. Unlike this user, I didn't get it "resolved" in a couple of days, though. It took literally months of correspondence with them. Back and forth, them asking me about mail in my account, who invited me, who I'd invited, people in my address book -- it took me weeks at a time to hear back from Google -- but eventually all their inquiries paid off. They assured me, in my own words, this was a case of "Tough shit." Why so many questions were asked and time was spent to tell me I'd never see the inside of my account again, I don't know. It was devastating, though--important e-mail, software registration codes, photos of friends and family--all gone. It's disheartening to see this still happening to people -- and certainly makes me question the safety of my date on Gmail's servers. They say archive everything, forever -- but I always thought forever was more than a dozen or so months.

After I got the bad news from Gmail that my account was gone forever, I was pissed--and swore to never bother with Gmail again. It only took a week or two for me to go crawling back, though. I popped open a new account and to this day entrust it with my data. Well, entrust may be the wrong word. I don't trust Gmail, by any means -- especially seeing this continuing to happen. I continuously backup everything via POP3 so the next time gmail decides to dump me, I lose nothing but a bit more faith in the service. I strongly recommend you do the same. Even if you don't lose your account, it's a lot easier to download your mail now before your account gets bigger. Keep a local copy of your mail base -- and in the event you lose your account, find something better, or just want a local copy to search through when you don't have access to the net--you've got it right there.

Don't let your or the Internets love for Gmail blind you to the truth -- If your data means anything to you -- preservation is your responsibility. I know these are cliché, but their age is a testament to their
truth.
Don't put all your eggs in one basket
If you want something done right, do it yourself.

For the first time in quite some time I've completely redone theprawn.com. This time around, I decided to take a wiki approach. As always, I wasn't content to download one of the many available free wiki scripts floating around out there--I had to make this my own.

I should tell you that although I've always been a fan of the wiki concept my experience with them has been minimal. Subsequently, there very well may be wiki staples that are missing and things included that don't belong in a wiki -- My aim wasn't to necessarily emulate any specific wikis. I just wanted to borrow some of the concepts of the wiki and craft one that did what I needed. So, the primary focus for me was simplicity. I didn't want anything terribly complicated, overflowing with excess features I haven't a need for. What I did want it to be overflowing with is markup syntax -- which is the heart and soul of it. I want to be able to edit the files without resorting to html. The markup conventions are largely a hybrid of general wiki syntax as I know it, textile and a healthy dose of my own ideas where these things seemed to fall short. For example, I've made almost every element -- from paragraphs to preformatted blocks -- take color parameters so you can, optionally, change their text and or background color. I don't know any other wiki's (or textile engines) that provide syntax of this depth.

Tables, lists (nestable), preformatted blocks that escape markup as well as preformatted blocks that render: I'm confident I've covered most of the important syntax -- though I'll no doubt think of other widgets to add over time if no reason other than I like to tinker.

Continuing with the theme of simplicity--for ease of setup, it just reads/writes from/to plain text files rather than messing with a database. This also makes things easy to backup and/or transfer elsewhere.

Files are protected from conflicting users by using a lock file system--when one person is editing it another cannot. These lock-files expire in case of abandonment in an interval that can be changed in the options. The options are just a wiki page -- so there's no ftp or text editors involved when I want to change the settings.

While it doesn't support version history archival or version comparison, it does at least keep track of the most recently edited files. Once bumped off that list, though, it's easy for files that aren't commonly linked to to get lost in the abyss that is wiki. I am considering a file-list function -- to list all available public pages, but we'll see. Also up for consideration is a spell check -- I'm just terrible at spelling, perhaps my wiki could help me out

Anyway, if you're interested
My Page (powered by TPWiki)
TPWiki (download available)

Just a quick note -- sorry about all the unpruned spam comments in the 30gigs.com related posts. I forgot I'd enabled anonymous posting and the result was a couple pages of nonesense, mostly invite requests. I've since decluttered it. This blog isn't abandoned, I'm just not a very good (frequent) blogger.