Of all the luck...

Seriously. WTF!? My ENTIRE day has been pretty much a complete waste of time. I woke up and noticed that my phone was sitting on the "boot" animation screen. I shrugged and ignored it. I checked it again about 30 minutes later, and it STILL was on the boot animation screen. So I knew there was a problem. This tends to happen every once in a while when over-the-air updates come through, or a system app crashes. The fix is usually to pop out the battery and then pop it back in and power the phone back on...

Well, I did just that, and it resumed the boot animation for an hour, then the animation froze and the phone did nothing. SHIT! Alright, so time to dig in and try to resolve this quickly so I can get on with my day...HAH!

I've got an old smartphone. No, really, an OLD AT&T branded HTC Inspire 4G (Also known correctly as the HTC Desire HD aka The "ACE".) Several years ago I unlocked the phone and flashed a custom ROM to the device; And until today it had worked great. MUCH better than the stock HTC Sense that ships with the phone. So, the first thing I did was boot into recovery mode using the Volume-down button + Power-button power-on trick and choose RECOVERY from the hboot bootloader. And then I proceeded to attempt to create a backup of my device's data, settings, apps, and shit. Well, that failed miserably for whatever reason. Maybe it has to do with the screwed up boot? I don't have a clue. It doesn't matter at this point anyway...

So with all my data lost anyway, I formatted all my partitions and cleared my dalvik cache and proceeded to attempt to re-install my custom rom. Things appeared to be going smoothly just like it did years ago when I first installed it...

Then, after booting the freshly installed rom and going through all the motions of setting up my google account, and configuring all the settings how I like them....I have a nice ugly NO SERVICE notice on the screen. Well that's just great. I have a phone with no way to use it as a PHONE. I've had that message pop up a couple times over the last two years, and the solution was to simply reboot, then things were fine... NOT THIS TIME, NOoooo. So, NO SERVICE is pretty useless. I went back into the recovery mode and tried again, cause y'know, maybe something dropped a bit somewhere...

After the THIRD attempt, I decided to say FUCK IT and go back to the stock rom...7 failed attempts of finding a working HTC Sense rom, and I said screw it, and started looking at other options... I tried out 12, yes, TWELVE different custom roms and NOT ONE OF THEM worked for me. In the process, I ended up installing two new recovery images, flashing 6 new boot images, and factory-reset/formatting more times than I can remember...

I finally have gotten truly fed-up and I have yet another custom rom installed, and it still says NO SERVICE on my phone, and I've decided to contact customer support. So I head over to the AT&T site and after a chat with a rep, I learn that it's too damn early to talk to a technical support agent, and that I gotta try back later during business hours!

So here I am, more than 12 hours later, still with no usable phone, and that's not the only problem. I did not get to finish my LD32 entry because of all of this bullshit today. I was so close to finishing last night, but I needed to get sleep. In hind sight that was a mistake, because I got shit sleep, and then did not get to finish my entry because I was stuck dealing with a stupid piece of shit smartphone.

Right, so yeah. end-rant and all that.
Until next time, this is the Rambling Indie Richard Marks.