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Friday, March 23, 2007

Satellite radio

Jennifer got me an S50 for my birthday a couple years ago. I'd wanted satellite radio since a rental car during the summer of 2003 gave me a taste of it. It truly is the greatest thing to come out of the sky since the sun (and even that has to take a break sometimes). In the December of 2005 she bought me the in-car unit, which was awesome, but I wasn't in my car much. Although I have to admit, sometimes I just sat in my car to listen to the radio :) For my last birthday, in a move of pure genius, she bought my the in home, "Executive," unit&nsbp;- an addiction was born. Since December, I've easily used the unit at least 4 hours per day, and that's not including my in-car use.

Thus, you can imagine my dispare when last Sunday, as Tamia's Stranger in My House was playing (yea, I have my feminine moments), the unit died. At first, I wasn't too scared because dying was a normal part of my S50's operation. Since I'd gotten one of the first production models ever made, there were a ton of bugs, and throughout the 14 months of operation I'd (thought I'd) seen them all. But this one was different. Unlike with previous problems, none of my hack-methods could get the machine to come back on properly. And to make matters worse, Jennifer and I have a road trip planned this weekend - the possibility of suicide, while slight, is present if I do not have satellite radio on a road trip.

I call Sirius on Monday to find out what can be done only to learn that the S50 is neither supported nor sold by the company; if their hack-methods didn't work, I was up a creek. The first thing they suggested was a "hard reboot," which sounded good to me, but did come with a catch: it could only be done via the computer interface, and I'd lost my computer interfacing cables :(

By this time it's Wednesday and I'm thinking there's no way I'm going to get this device back gear. Forget the road trip, I'm going to have to purchase a new S50 all together! Then I stumbled upon an electronics company that sold obscure S50 parts, including the computer cable. Nice, at least I can give the hard-reboot a shot now. But there's still no way I'm going to have this thing ready by Friday… oh how I doubted the postal service! Much to my surprise, using normal ground shipping I received the part Thursday! It was incredible. With a simple driver update, the S50 was back to new… actually better than new.

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