Technical recovery

I have been operating without any personal information management device since Wednesday when my iPhone shut down and refused to come back up. I had been trying to get a satellite fix so I could track a family hike using one of half a dozen GPS apps that I'd downloaded to the phone. The iPhone flat-lined in the middle of that attempt and despite my IT support team's best efforts it would not come back to life. I still have a Verizon feature phone that I've been using when the iPhone can't get a signal (which is much of the time) so at least I am connected. However, without the iPhone I can't reach my business email any time that I wish and, most importantly, I'm unable to use GPS apps to track my runs.

After almost five days without an iPhone or Blackberry I feel pretty good. Funny that when these devices aren't available you can really focus on other things. My wife surely appreciated that I wasn't constantly staring at a 3" screen all week while on vacation. Now that I'm back in my office I have a legitimate need for mobile connectivity and I just found out that IT has resurrected my iPhone. I'm rather shocked since I tried for hours to get it to restart. They still don't know why it failed and they suggested that wiping it clean and starting over might be the best course of action. I'm unwilling to reload all the apps and content I'd put on it so I'm getting it back as is. I hope it doesn't fail again.

I'll use it tomorrow to track my morning run. Yesterday afternoon my daughter and I covered a couple of neighborhood miles which I tracked using my Garmin 50 that I'd calibrated at the track earlier in the day. I had some frustrations over the weekend when the Garmin Connect website coughed and sputtered and refused to upload one of my runs. The run appeared to upload but then disappeared from the site. I was thrilled when I went onto Connect yesterday and saw that the 'technical difficulties' notification had been removed and I was further amazed to see my 5.25 mile Saturday run magically appear in my log. So despite the clumsy way it happened two running technology issues are resolved. Well at least for now.