Thanks for the memory

So, since I bounce around so much from computer to computer (even more now with the laptop), I have been keeping all my school files on a flash drive / thumb drive / memory stick / whatever the heck we're supposed to call them. I have a 512 MB unit with my Excel spreadsheet grade books, lessons, assignment rubrics, graphics, and all that stuff on it. I back it up regularly, but it sure makes life easier.

Today, when I pulled it out of the classroom computer at NSCC, it looked like this:



The formerly straight USB plug was bent at almost a 45-degree angle. This might be a cool design feature, but it was actually an accidental bend, probably occurring while it was in my pocket.

Needless to say, this worried me. It seemed to work fine, but I would hate to lose that data unexpectedly. When I got home, I immediately backed everything up again, and then started to play with the unit. I straightened out the plug, but something started to rattle around inside. The unit seemed to be working, but did not recognize the 'eject' command; it would give me the Danger! warning when I would take it out. Thinking the rattley bit might have something to do with that, I popped open the red plastic housing. A tiny little metal piece, about the size of the ball in a ball-point pen, fell out, but I couldn't tell where it had come from. The funny part was that the naked circuit board worked just perfectly - and looked really cool, too! (The power light was a whole lot brighter).

I figured that leaving the circuit board naked probably wasn't a good idea, no matter how cool it looked, so I snapped the unit back together and wrapped some tape around it for good measure. It appears to be working fine.

I guess the moral of the story is that those things aren't as fragile as we think, or I'm really lucky.

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Yesterday was mostly work, but in the evening we did watch The Trouble with Harry, Alfred Hitchcock's black comedy about hiding a corpse, which stars John Forsythe as a flaky artist (?!) and marks Shirley MacLaine's screen debut. It was quite a change-of-pace for Hitchcock; I found it engaging, amusing, and, at times, laugh-out-loud funny.