My Palm froze up on Friday while using it for wireless email with my OmniSky modem. Not even a hard reset would fix the problem so I had to wait till I got back to my office to check various web sites to see what the error message might be. Turns out it’s an Omnisky glitch that corrupts a file in flash ROM so I had to call their tech support to talk me through the first part of the fix. I’ve generally been happy with OmniSky, and their tech support has been very good each of the 3 times I’ve called in the 3 months I’ve used them.
I’d backed everything up in two different places so I wasn’t in dire straits. And the whole thing gave me a good reason to bail on the Franklin Covey Planner software I’d been using. I’ve used the paper Covey planner since the late 80s but their PC and Palm-based software has sucked big time till V7.3 came out last year. I bought my Palm Vx from one of their stores so I could get their software bundled free. I liked it initially, but then lots of bugs and limitations began to emerge over the months and the grumbling on their website from the users made me increasingly wary that the tech outfit they were using to build this thing was not to be depended on. Plus they should have had patches available long ago.
Anyway, I went back to my office on Friday night about 9 pm, hoping to get everything restored onto the new Palm 4.0 desktop software and all the apps and data put back onto the Palm. Two hours later, I wasn’t even close. Oy. By 1:30 am, I was pretty much done, except for my to-do lists which I’ll have to do manually.
Usually, something like this drives me crazy and I’m swearing and stomping around, exasperated at the wasted time. But this time, for some reason, it occured to me to treat this problem like a mechanical problem with my dirt bike. Anybody who engages in motorcycle competition for very long knows that things go wrong with the bike pretty regularly. So occasional late-night sessions in the garage with my observed trials bike is something I’m familiar with and take for granted… at least I try to most of the time.
I decided to treat this the same way and it made a huge difference. I was tired, but I wasn’t cranky. This glitch was more ‘interesting’ than a pain.