Another catch-up post

Written Friday, backdated to Thursday.

Was up till 3 am un-bricking my phone. After a LONG Iolanthe rehearsal. After a very busy and late day at work.

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Thursday:
My new machine at work had been hooked up a bit more to the network. The day before all I could do was ru the user interface and play with SNMP, but now it had three video ports connected, so I could send all kinds of video through it. I played around a lot with that, but toward the end of the day when I was ready to watch video, it wasn't there. Turns out the unit had not been configured with the right IP info for the video ports. And it had not been connected to the SDI port. SDI is an ancient coax cable transport system which takes video from a satellite dish, in this case one program at a time. When I worked at Sony and Microsoft, they were all-SDI for high speed video.

Lunch was at KFC. Crispy dark meat combo. The mashed potato and cole slaw containers make nifty lunchbox accessories for peanut butter and preserves.

Home after work, I may have left a little earlier than 6. Left for rehearsals at 7, and was 15 minutes early. Again. At 7:30 start time it was only me and one other cast member - or so I thought. turned out several people were up in the green room jawing and snacking.

We were supposed to have a work-through and then a run-through of all the Act I music, but the music director had made his plans without consulting the conflicts calendar which the stage manager painstakingly maintains online. Only one of the leads was there and several chorus members were out. These are pre-announced excused absences which everyone knows about weeks in advance. Since there were not the people to do a run-through, we worked most of the act's music for who we had, and were sent home half an hour early because the MD was frustrated with his plans being foiled. His own damned fault. Rule #1 when scheduling rehearsals is work around the conflicts, even if it means not being OCD about doing things in chronological order.

Home, Spook was very vocal for no apparent reason.

More Thursday - the brick story

Soon after I got my Samsung Galaxy S4 cell phone from AT&T, the annoying start-up "tune", which sounds like the notes from Close Encounters of the Third Kind's UFO if you're tone deaf with no sense of rhythm (in other words, a percussionist). It's very loud, and since I often turned my phone on when this would be embarrassing, I wanted to get rid of it. And I wanted to replace the AT&T logo with something Android-ish.

In order to do that, one has to replace the sound and image files with one's own, and in order to do that, one must have administrative privileges on the phone's file system. Another name for the system administrator is "root" hence the term "rooting".

So I went online, found the tools to root my phone, replaced the sound with a silent audio-format file, and the image with an animation of the green android robot peeing on an apple logo.

Being rooted also made my phone able to accept third-party SIMs, so on my trip to London I was able to use one from the UK which charged me UK-local data rates instead of AT&T's obscene international roaming rates.

But rooting the phone had a couple of bad side effects:

1. Android OS updates from AT&T failed, even after I put the AT&T SIM back into the phone when I got back stateside
2. The keypad did not work correctly unless the speakerphone was enabled
3. The Samsung keyboard crashed every 5 seconds. I was able to use Google and other 3rd party keyboard apps, but the were not as good.

So I went online yesterday from work, and fund some directions for un-rooting my phone. It required erasing most of my user data, but that's only a temporary issue because all of that is backed up to Google's sync center.

But restoring from backup take a long time, and my phone kept making rude noises all during rehearsals, and in the end it wouldn't update.

So when I got home from Iolanthe, I went back online and found a better, older set of instructions and files, and was up till 3 am with that.