Friday, December 28, 2012

When Good Gadgets Go Bad

Time for music.  

Reaching for the remote, the red button is pressed bringing the radio to life.  Walking to the stereo, the power and aux buttons are pressed to power on the unit so the music can come out of the speakers.   It is not a remarkable stereo, simply used as an amplifier just for this purpose, to play internet radio.

The internet radio is a Squeezebox, but for that matter it could be an iPhone or a Tablet computer.  The sound is routed from the headphone jack to the back of the stereo.   It is a simple setup.

Waiting as the Squeezebox goes through its paces, it comes to life and waits for further commands.  The keypads on the remote are hit to make the thing go up through the list to find "Favorites".  Unfortunately it has a headache and goes right past it looping around to the beginning of the list at "Now Playing".

Pressing up again, it begins to go through the list one at a time on its own.  Faster and faster on a crazy blur of blue-green fluorescent letters in a blur until it stumbles back to Now Playing.

Press up again and for some reason, it bumps one at a time to get to favorites.   Then to the list of channels.  There are 63 of them.  Up is pressed.  Luckily it goes to the bottom of the list.  Press up again and it goes through the list in that crazy blur.   Then the radio jumps to the configuration menu and spasms there as if someone has hit it in the head giving it a concussion worthy of a trip to the computer hospital. 

Go home radio, you're drunk.

Give up on that, turn on a different and much more basic radio until curiosity raises its ugly head again.  After all, why have just local FM when the world awaits you on a spastic little black slab of plastic?

This circular behavior and logic continues onward for a week.  The semi solution of a work around was that for the last five days it was left on Discover Trance for 24 hours a day because to turn it off meant that more head scratching and dancing in a blue-green blur would happen.

Finally today the solution was found.  The batteries in the remote were replaced after spinning them around in their mounts a couple times, and in the clarity of a second mug of coffee a "Why Not" moment of playing "Lets Replace The Batteries" occurred. 

Seems that the broken part of the electronic gadget was the human operating the remote.

So remember, if your electronics aren't working... check the batteries.  The mind you save may be your own.

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