Every now and again, I see something that seems poorly designed, and the way to improve on that design seems obvious. Being a nerd, I often cannot help myself, and often a small modification leaves me with something far better than what I started with.
Other times, this compulsion bites me in the ass.
*sigh*. I've not gotten any website email in a month or so, and it's all my fault. Click through if you want to know the details, along with another tale of idiocy. If you've sent me any email this month, please resend it and feel free to berate me.
So I'll take this space to tell you two stories of my modification idiocy.
First is a story I like to call "Why Drew Doesn't Have A Nintendo DS Anymore".
I bought a DS when we were visiting Japan - my first mistake was getting one at all, given that in Japan, all the games are - surprise! - in Japanese only. Also, games are expensive, like $40 each! Seeing as all those same games are available to steal download from the internet, assuming you have the right hardware, I decided to pursue this course.
So, I found and acquired a SuperKey and a SuperCard, which are essentially a MicroSD reader for your DS. This worked great - well, mostly. The MicroSD is down in front, right where you'd normally put your pinky finger while playing the DS. The problem is, if you move the MicroSD at all, it loses connection with the reader. This isn't immediately noticible, however the next time the game tries to read from or write to the card, the game crashes. After about ten crashes this way, I decided to take matters into my own hands.
See, it makes perfect sense: the pins that connect the MicroSD aren't making good enough contact, so I could just bend them up a bit, and it'd work better, right? Well, that's somewhat the case - I bent the pins up, and it worked, though not particularly better. It still worked, anyway - until I removed the MicroSD while the game was playing, and the DS went suddenly dark. And wouldn't turn back on.
*sigh*. So it turns out, the DS runs a voltage through those pins, and the housing for the MicroSD slot is metal. When I bent up the pins, it caused them to touch the metal and ground out, blowing a fuse in the DS.
SO, I googled and found a site that explained how to get around this horrible problem: open the DS and solder over the fuse. I proceeded to do this, tested it, and it worked fine - but in the process of putting the now-working DS back together, I managed to snap off the power switch.
*sigh*. To top it all off, taking apart the little MicroSD reader for a third time to bend the pins back, the flexible ribbon cable connecting the two circuitboards came loose, and long story short, the reader is now dead too. Moral: it works, don't fuck with it!
ANYWAY.
Email has been broken, because I am an idiot. Basically, I used the built-in email thingey in my content management software, but I didn't really like the layout of the default "Contact MUX" page. I decided to rebuild it, and it looked much better. My tests worked fine too. The problem was that there was a string of random characters in the page that I assumed was an encoding of my email address, but that turned out to be a unique identifier string to stop spammers. I copied and pasted that string into the new page, but basically, that made the page not work anymore. Worse still, when someone filled out the form, it would give them a "Thanks for your email, it's in my inbox now!" message, and quietly eat the email. END RESULT: IF YOU HAVE EMAILED ME THIS MONTH, AND I DIDN'T REPLY, IT IS BECAUSE I DID NOT RECEIVE YOUR EMAIL. I am an idiot, I know. According to the weblogs, I've missed at least a dozen emails, and I have no way to find out what they were. Few things are more frustrating. :(
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