While it may seem self-indulgent, I have been asked a number of times recently what I am reading, so I'm going to tell you.

I tend to flit around on subject matter, although I seem to settle in and read the Lord Of The Rings about once a year or so.

Recently, I have spent time with:

• The Wise Heart by Jack Kornfield (Buddhist psychology)
• Form & Void by Dave Sim & Gerhard (Cerebus the Aardvark)
• Dust of Dreams by Steven Erickson (Malazan Book of the Fallen)
• The American Night by Jim Morrison (more of his intellectual meanderings)
• Supernatural by Graham Hancock (more of his mystical explorations)
• The Book by Atari (Atari's guide for arcade game repair)

So there you have it -- nothing earth-shattering or profound, just stuff that is interesting to me.

Yesterday marked the first time I have received an Incident Report for an altercation involving one of my kids. To make it a banner day, I got one for each of the boys.

Now, in both cases our kid was the victim, but the differences between the two reports reveals the inanity of trying to use a single administrative procedure in dealing with the acts of children.

The first report had to do with Gilby, who is in the first grade and is as sweet and sensitive as can be. He was playing with his friends at recess and the pocket on his sweatshirt got ripped. Normal stuff that happens with boys and physical play. I was greeted by the Chairperson of the school and Gilby's friends who apologized to me. Seems to be an somewhat over-the-top response and I shook both boy's hands and let them know that everything was fine and thanked them for their apologies. Gilby wasn't sad or mad and even told the boys that "my Dad can use a string and fix it" (Cheffo's gots teh skills!).

Complete administrative overreaction.

On the flip side, the report involving Kevin was the 17th such report involving violence for the offending student since March 2nd, when he was allowed to return to school after being expelled for similar behaviour.

17 incidents of violence in less than two months!

That boy wasn't made to apologize to me (which I expect would have been far more effective than the two days of recess that he has to give up) and there is no reasonable plan to remedy the situation going forward. The same old administrative routines haven't worked and, I would suggest, have likely contributed to his bad behaviour. Somebody is going to get seriously hurt.

Total administrative failure.

Maybe it is time to get this kid some help ... or his parents some help ... or at least keep him from wreaking havoc on the other kids.

Administrators need to learn that kids are not appliances and that the rubber-stamp-and-form approach is just silly -- the kids understand that -- why can't the adults ?

After 18 months of loving my Bold 9000, I have experienced the permanent trackball failure that renders it mostly unusable. I figured that, since I have repaired at least a dozen arcade trackballs, fixing the trackball in my BB shouldn't be too much of a leap. It's out of warranty and, really, how hard can it be ?

So, I took the plunge this morning and disassembled my beloved Bold. I had heard that Bold's are hard to take apart, but nothing could be further from the truth. OK, so I do have the advantage of owning two decent sets of screwdrivers and bits (including the required Torx T6) and have a "third hand" with a magnifying glass, but it was still very simple. Pop out six screws and then gently disengage the body and main board from the case. Releasing the retaining clip for the trackball was a bit of a pain, but the sharp edge of an exacto blade fit nicely and allowed my to get the trackball free.

I figured that, like an old ball mouse or arcade trackball, a build-up of gunk on one of the rollers was the culprit. Should be easy enough to clean it up.

And that is when it occured to me that my plan was doomed to failure. Unlike an arcade trackball, the housing for the BB trackball is damned small and I couldn't see a way to get it apart that would allow me to get it back together with any degree of certainty. I gave it a few blasts of compressed air, cleaned the contacts and tried to get the rollers moving. I then carefully fitted the pieces back together, replaced the battery and held my breath.

Good news -- I can now move side-to-side. Up, not so much. Down, not at all. OK, maybe that's not such good news.

Based on the way that the trackball housing fits on the main board, I think I can reverse it and regain down, while forgoing up. Down will give me the ability to at least read my messages and provide limited responses. Since I will be away from a computer for an extended time today, maybe that's a good idea -- if only so I can check the system monitoring updates that I get every few minutes. I haven't decided ... definitely feeling lazy today.

Since she's out of warranty, my options are to either have Rogers replace it, which carries the same price ($600) as getting a brand new Bold 9700 (not altogether unappealing since the 9700 has a trackpad and not a stupid trackball), driving downtown to the repair shop and paying them to replace the ball. Their site says $15 labour + parts, but i think that labour price applies to the Pearl and Curve, which are easier jobs. Then there's gas, parking and, more importantly, aggravation. of driving downtown during the holiday season. Oh, and there is the time away from work, which is busy and booming.

So, I did the only sensible thing and decided to order a replacement trackball and install it myself.

Going in, I did not recognize the peril of the path that I had chosen. Not the "life and limb" for my poor BB, but rather the interesting and seemingly unending array of bling available to trick my Bold out. After spending a couple of hours imagining various combinations of bezels, battery covers, faceplates, keyboards and trackballs (a totally black Bold seems like it would be totally amazing), I abandoned my quest to trick out my Bold and went back to "let's get the damned thing working again".

I ordered myself a pair of trackballs ... one red and one black, because I figured I should have a spare on hand and there is always room for a little bling ... and shelling out $27 for overnight delivery (more than the cost of the two trackballs combined, but not much more than gas, parking and labour if I chose to take it to the shop) so that I can be up and running again by Monday evening.

Now, back to my decision for the day ... should I be happy with up, or would I prefer to go down ?

After the collapse of the last blog software, I went back to basic HTML to post some pics and stuff.

 

I never, ever updated it.

 

So, now we're back and running a real blog engine again.

 

So far so good.