The long weekend was nice, although there was way too much water up there. You could stand in knee high water on the docks if you wanted (well, except for the wood ones which were moved to land whenever they went underwater), and the boats were only in the water during the day when they could be parked on the lawn as needed. Not helping the situation any resulted in many storms with heavy rain and lots of lighting. They gave flash flood warnings, but I don't think anyone would have been too surprized at any level of flooding. Anyways, it provided lots of opportunity for me to sit outside and watch the rain while listening to music and sometimes taking (and more often attempting) pictures of lighting. Dave will be happy to hear that I did listen to some HA up there, and I'd have to say that's probably better than in the dark. I will admit I like it, but it gets tiring after a couple songs.

Anyways, issue number one with the weekend was I forgot the charger to my karma at home. That's an issue, because although it lasts like 15 hours, the weekend is a lot longer than that. The drive time was easy, because then the computer is usable (while I'm not driving at least), and it can be plugged in. After being unsuccessful in locating a charger by my high-tech text-to-intarweb gateway (aka schdav), and their support people not being able to tell me anymore than "we have to tell you that you can buy them through our web site" (odd, considering he did try to help me after that statement) and the same specs that are on the back of the unit, I came up with another good idea. My Axim has plenty of CPU and battery capacity (and a charger), BetaPlayer plays pretty much anything, and being that I have a digital SLR I have plenty of CF memory available. So I loaded up a decent amount of music on there, plugged in my headphones, and was quickly annoyed that the lowest volume level was quite loud - I think it's designed for normal headphones. Equalizers and preamp settings came to the rescue though, and I had a nice source of music all weekend. I'm actually sorta impressed by the sound quality, and the battery life was nice in that I could listen to music all day without any problem on the standard battery. Someone commented on it and my response was "the nice part about having too many toys is that they can start substituting for each other." And I'll stick to that. :)

Issue number two was with my phone. It wasn't so much that I locked myself out of it (sorta), but that by the end of the weekend I had a pile of voicemails and text messages I couldn't check and had no forseeable ability to check. Anyways, my phone usually stays on for months at a time. The only time I turn it on is if I've been out of service or on analog for most of a day and the battery goes dead, which is pretty much only out in the middle of nowhere. So of course out in the mountains of North Dakota, this is actually the case. As a side note ND is actually relatively solidly covered by VZW otherwise. And yes, the description is worse than Eagle Mountain in MN, but they're enough that there's natural forests and lakes up there. Anyways, I turn the thing back on and it's locked. Except it doesn't like my code, and being there's the months between restarts, I'm sorta iffy and try a few different things. I walk over to a digital area and try a reprogramming, and that doesn't work (probably because the phone was locked). Anyways, after trying off and on, and VZW being confused at the programming menus not letting me run them without it being unlocked (Nokia eliminated the concept of a default override security code and programming loopholes recently since it pretty much defeated the effectiveness of the locks when they were common knowledge), I decided to just switch phones when I got home, and bring it to a store the next day. After 10-15 minutes of letting the computer go at it, the guy told me the code, which turns out to be a truncated version of my previous one, that must have been set by the system during a recent update. I had tried it before, but after too many attempts it locks me out, and I hadn't been persistent enough at resetting and trying. At least I have a phone I can use for things other than incomming calls, calling my work phone, and calling customer service though.

Anyways, the weekend went well otherwise, and I'll hopefully post pictures sometime soon. We'll see how motivated I get on that one though.