Steve Jobs. 1955-2011

R.I.P.

After nearly a full month of flawless operation, my DIY ethernet thermostat suffered some kind of stroke yesterday evening, and this morning slipped into a coma.

I don’t know what cause the glitch but it appears that the microcontroller that runs the whole thing has been fatally befuddled. And while 98.2% of the time, I use a socket for any IC in any project, in this case for some stupid reason I did not.

Indeed, everything is soldered, hot-glued, and taped in there so well that I’m not sure it’s even worth-while attempting to debug & repair. I think this is a back-to-the-drawing-board moment. Or at least, back-to-the-assembly-line moment.

So, I have a couple replacement parts on order (and you can bet I’m re-stocking my IC stocket supply), and I suppose I’ll have to rebuild the darn thing over the weekend. It wouldn’t be such an issue if this had happened closer to the summer months, but for now I can’t leave the house unheated for days-on-end.

Hopefully the parts will arrive tomorrow and I’ll be able to get at it. Otherwise it’ll probably be a week before I can recover from this tragedy.

In the meantime, my home heating needs are being serviced by this neolithic thermostat that was recovered from an archaeological dig, and has been on display in a dusty old museum somewhere. Or quite possibly I found it on a shelf in the storage closet.

The past two months I’ve been obsessing on this electronics stuff. Thermostat. Kits. Soldering. Embedded devices.

It’s been “theraputic” – the point was to keep me busy, to keep my mind off of the depression and keep the dark thoughts away. Lately it’s been working less and less.

And the thing that’s coming up now is, I’m not sure if it’s even been fun. There’s the challenge, it’s satisfying to figure something out or make something work. But down to the nitty gritty of it – I don’t know if it’s been fun. If it’s been worth it.

I started doing a bit of cleaning and tidying today, and ended up gathering up all the electronic bits and pieces and stuff, and just putting it all in a big box. I still have lots of half-formed thoughts on things that I could make, but I don’t have the urge to actually make any of them.

The thermostat is finished, fully working. All I have to do is hook it up. It’s in the big box with the rest of the stuff. I even built a wireless outdoor temperature sensor last night, to radio the outside temp in so it could be displayed on the thermostat. That’s in the big box too.

I look at it all, and there’s no emotions. Was it fun? There sure were a heck of a lot of frustrations. Things not working, things that broke. And I don’t even want to think about how much money I spent on components, kits, parts, et cetera.

Was it supposed to be fun? At times it felt like homework – stuff I was doing because I had to. It was the assignment. Do that, or sit quietly in the dark and let my head fill up with images of death.

I guess I won’t put the big box away just yet — I’ll leave it out, and see if the urge strikes to open it and do more electronics stuff. Maybe install the thermostat. Or not. Whatever.

So last night, there was this show on Discovery Channel, about the dinosaurs getting killed by the meteor or comet or whatever it was. They’ve been hyping it for a week or two, making such a big deal out of it.

Well, So I started to watch. I tried. But after only a few minutes I had to switch it off.

It’s not educational — we already have a pretty good idea of the cosmic collision theory. And it wasn’t entertaining.

Make-believe CGI beasties or not, I just can’t find anything entertaining about watching animals suffer for 90 minutes. It was just sad.

Sorry Discovery Channel – I’m sure you spent lots of money on the special effects, but special-effects-alone does not a good show make. So, booo.

It has been a tumultuous fortnight, for the snailies.

About 2 weeks ago, my girl Shelly died for reasons unknown. She just slowed down and died. She had laid a dozen egg clutches, and had about 200 offspring sliming around the place, and I don’t know why she died but it was sad.

Then a few days after she passed on, some of her daughters started laying clutches of their own. Within a week, there were five new little clutches laid.

Then over the weekend Munchkin started to slow down, the way Shelly had. Munchkin was the father of all the wee babies. Today I came home from work in the afternoon, to find Munchkin too had passed away. Again, I don’t know why…

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There’s some words you don’t want to see when you open an envelope. You know any document that opens with that line, is going to be bad news.

We got one of those letters at the office recently. Turns out one of our customers has gone bankrupt. We knew they were in trouble, considering some of their bills had gone unpaid for a very long time. Still, whenever we spoke with them, they were apologetic, times are tough all round, etc., but never said anything about spiraling the drain. Of course, maybe the folks we talked to didn’t know.

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My little golden snail, whom I have been worried about for some time now, finally passed away. In the six or seven weeks I’ve had her, she seldom ate, and had not grown at all. For the past fortnight she almost never ate and was growing visibly weaker.

Although I hardly knew her, I’ll miss her. Goodbye little cutie.