Ben There, Done That

I’ve posted bits and pieces of this story on Facebook, but decided to make it into a blog posting as a friend of mine suggested.  First of all, this is a departure from my usual topic of SharePoint .

Last weekend my whole family was in town and we spent a fair amount of time at the pool.  Saturday afternoon we went over to the pool for a swim.  As we got out of the car, I threw my Palm Treo Pro into my swimsuit pocket to free up my hands to carry other stuff.  We got to the pool and all jumped in.

After swimming for about 10 – 15 minutes, I felt something in my swimsuit…you guessed it, it was my phone!!  To skip to the end of the story, it almost completely works today…touch screen and all.  The only known issue right now is the vibrate on the phone no longer works.  So how did I get it back working again?

1.  As soon as I realized it was in my pocket I pulled it out of the water, removed the batter and dried it off the best I could (you could see water inside the screen).  My wife shook the phone a little bit to get some of the water out.  After that, we continued to swim and I just left the phone, with the batter still removed, wrapped in a towel.

2. Once we got home I immediately put my phone and battery (with the batter still removed) in a zip loc back and filled the bag with rice to absorb all the moisture.  I left the phone in the rice all weekend, checking it sporadically to see how the screen was drying out.  My Monday morning I needed my phone for work and it looked to be completely dry.

3.  When I arrived at work, I stuck the battery back in the phone for the first time after it got wet…low and behold, it didn’t work   Talking to a few co-workers they mentioned similar experiences who said getting a new battery fixed their phone.

4. After work, I stopped in at the Sprint store to see if they had a batter around that I could try.  After sharing the story with them, they were unconvinced that a batter would fix it, but complied with my request anyways and got a new batter to try.  We stuck the brand new battery in and the phone started right up!!!

I’ve been using the phone with the new batter for almost a week now with the only problem being the vibrate no longer working that I mentioned before.  There is also some discoloration inside the screen, but that seems to be slowly going away and the touch screen functionality still works perfectly.

So, that is the story of my phone.  Moral of the story..if you phone gets wet, remove the battery, dry it off, place it in a bag of rice for at least a day, if it still doesn’t work, try a new battery.

The other day I had an annoying problem accessing SharePoint sites.  I am running Windows 7, IE8 and Office 2007 and Office 2010 Beta.

Any internal SharePoint site continued to throw the error of element not found for init.js

It only happened on my desktop (my laptop worked just fine).  I tried clearing the temporary internet files, browser cache, even uninstalling and reinstalling IE8.

Nothing worked, I finally found the solution here – http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/sharepointgeneral/thread/41e1874f-7825-4bfe-ba4c-37255d198df2

So, I opened up SharePoint Designer 2007, ran the diagnostic tool in the Help menu, restarted IE and everything was back to working as normal.