Stroke is actually no laughing matter in my family.  On mom’s side, it’s pretty much what happens to the males.  I’m hoping I take more after dad’s side of the family in that regard, but I reckon it’ll be hard to know until I ether get my first stroke, or die without having had one.  So I suppose I shouldn’t be so anxious to know. 

What I’m finding out though, is that the age I live in gives a fella many more ways to experience a stroke then my elders had. I can experience a system crash while debugging a program and loose all the work I was busy with that moment.  I can loose half the data on one of my file server’s hard drives.  Bang…there goes my banking data, my address book, my emails, and god only knows what else.  This morning I nearly lost all the data I’d entered into my Palm/cell phone since I backed it up last.  And I haven’t been as good a boy as I should have been about that.

[Geek Alert]

My cell phone is a two year old Kyocera Smart Phone.  It has a built-in Palm pilot that I joke holds about half my brain, in terms of keeping track of my calendar, contact info, and random this and that I can stuff in it’s notepad and to-do lists.  It basically holds tons of day to day trivia that I need just to get on with my life…like frequently used phone numbers, business account numbers and data, appointments, scheduled meetings, and a reminder to fill out my damn time sheet at the end of the day and sign it at the end of the week.  Yes…I need to be nagged about stuff like that.  When I go traveling it holds my hotel info and if flying my ticket info too.  There is just so damn much of this stuff I need to have ready access to at random moments of my day, and I can’t possibly keep it all in my head.  I used to use a DayTimer book, but paper calendars won’t nag you to look at them.  I can set an alarm in my Palm for stuff I need nagging about.

When I made ready to leave for work this morning, I took my phone out of its cradle and noticed that it was giving me the low battery signal.  Ack, thinks I, I forgot to plug the damn thing in.  But it was.  So I unplugged and replugged it’s charger.  Nothing happened.  I tried jiggling the connector at the phone end.  Nada.  I examined the powerstrip.  It was still on, and serving power to some other peripherals.  I remembered I hadn’t backed up the Palm since…when was it?  I opened my hot sync software.  Last backup, March 27.  But I’d made a bunch of entries since then.  I set the phone back in its cradle and tried to hot sync.  The phone didn’t even have enough juice to laugh at me. 

I will not panic…I will not panic…  Either the Phone wasn’t accepting a charge or the charger had suddenly gone bad.  If it was the charger, I might be able to make due with one of the others I had squirreled away.  I have a box full of these little AC/DC transformer things.  I got my multimeter out and tried to test the charger, and realized that its plug was not a standard size.  It was tiny.  I couldn’t get any of the meter’s probes into it…I couldn’t even get a bent paper clip into it.  That also ment that I couldn’t easily use one of the spare transformers I had.  A quick inventory showed that none of their plugs would fit into the phone.

It was getting late and I had to get into work.  So I left the phone slowly bleeding out the last of its battery, certain that I was going to loose everything I’d entered into it since March.  On the way to work I tried to recollect what I’d probably entered into it since then.  Of course I could only vaguly recall one or two items.  I just can’t keep that stuff in my head anymore.  It’s all the work I can manage just to keep pointers to where data is in my brain now, never mind the actual data.

When I got back home I saw the phone was still showing a low battery warning, which meant it wasn’t completely dead yet.  I went down to the basement tool zone and fished out mom’s old sewing box, which I’d  inherited a few years ago. She had a really impressive collection of sewing needles and I selected large, thin one and inserted it into the business end of the phone charger.  It fit inside…just, but I was able to get a voltage reading off the needle with the multimeter.  The charger was producing the correct voltage after all.  I double checked the jack at the phone end.  It was clean and the pin inside of it wasn’t bent out of shape.  I tried inserting the charger plug again.  It fit snugly, but the phone would not charge. So either the battery had gone bad and wouldn’t take a charge anymore, or the phone’s internal circuitry was damaged somehow.

I was afraid to pull the battery, but I didn’t see I had any choice now.  It was either the battery or the phone, and either way I was going to loose my Palm data.  So I opened the battery door, and noticed the battery was a bit loose.  Oh well…  I yanked the battery, wiped the contacts, and reinserted it.  Then I tried the charger.  Immediately the phone lit up and began to charge the battery.

I flipped open the phone and it made me go through the Palm stylus setup.  When the main menu came up I tried the address book.  Everything was still there.  Whew!

Thank goodness you decided to wait until I got back from my vacation before you got cranky on me… 

There are my internal brain cells and there are the external ones.  The nice thing about the external ones is that they can be backed up and restored…a thing we can’t yet do for our organic brains.  Be nice if we could someday.  But then we’d probably get lazy about that too…

"Why’s Bruce so unhappy?"  "Oh…he had a brain crash the other day and we discovered he hadn’t backed up his brain since October 1999.  So we did the restore with what we had.  Then we had to break the news to him that Bush won.  Twice."