Life With Your iPhone

Life is often full of things that VEX us. It’s is worse when the thing that causes us to be vexxed is an important tool, like my iPhone. Now I want to say up front, I did take the Apple Care extended warranty, because if I hadn’t then I wouldn’t have found out why it stopped working that Sunday afternoon.

I had been making some calls and put it back in my pocket. I heard it give the message received beep and retrieved it only to find a totally blank response. Almost like a teenager on a Sunday morning. I tried all the things known to man and Apple Support to resurrect it, without any luck.

Taking it to the Apple Genius bar on the Monday, initially nothing, then please make an appointment with one of our techs. So with appointment made I left and returned.

In the meantime as I couldn’t be without my phone I put my SIM card into my slightly older phone, my Nokia N95. It’s a great phone, but seriously, after using my iPhone for 12 months it was like going back in time. Sure it did it’s stuff well, made calls, had the GPS, could send and receive all manner of messages, but the interface was just, well, clunky. So after being a Nokia advocate for such a long time I knew I had been converted.

Back to my iPhone. At the Genius Bar in the Apple Store, the guy there was very helpful. Checked this and that, ran some diagnostics, and actually got a glimmer from the device. I felt there was hope. He thought it might be a faulty connection to the screen or the screen itself was failing. It was only when he opened it up to reseat the connection did he find the real cause. The connector was indeed not seated correctly, but for the past 12 months or so it had been burning the logicboard (motherboard) and it was slowly frying itself.

Outcome: I was given a brand new device.

Thoughts: If I hadn’t had my extended warranty then I probably wouldn’t have even gone to the Genius Bar. To then find out it was a faulty unit all along made me think, would have the unit been replaced so quickly without the Extended Warranty. Probably not without a fight as the 12 month warranty was just passed.

I am happy with the outcome, two iPhones as I had already gone and upgrade to the 3Gs as I didn’t think my 3G would be fixable and I couldn’t live with my N95.

Yes the iPhone is a great bit of kit, but more than that “it’s my preferred tool of trade”.

Lunch is DANGEROUS for your WordPress Blog

Working on this wordpress blog has taught me a great lesson. Not heeding this lesson might cause you untold problems, wasted hours and lost productivity.

Some moment between going to lunch and returning from it saw a pack of malicious byte devils enter my site and gobble up a file. One simple little 18 line file, INDEX.PHP

I went and typed in the website address and saw nothing except a file and diectory list. My heart sank while beating just a little faster.

“I have a backup. It will be fine”. Only to find the backup wasn’t what I thought it was…essentially useless. “Ok, so what next? Where to get another copy of an index.php?”

Fortunately for me I had another wordpress blog site I could look at, so I copied the file across and re-entered my site URL and fortunately all was fixed. I had been VERY lucky.

My next step, I made a complete backup of my site. Better late than never right!

Backups are important, but only when you need them. Until then they are an administrative PITA. My advice to myself is make them regularly. My suggestion to you is to follow my advice. Not doing so maybe at your peril.