I have this not particularly serious hypothesis that I am one of a number of clones of the same individual. I repeat, for emphasis: not particularly serious. That said, it does strike me as a little peculiar just how many strangers will approach me, try to strike up a conversation as if we have some common history, then become very confused and insist that I look and sound exactly like someone they know. In at least one instance, this has happened to a me-lookalike who wasn't me -- my parents thought they saw me in New Orleans, tracked "me" down through the crowd, and only then discovered that it was someone else entirely.

Annoyingly, when pressed, these people are rarely capable of giving me any information about who these lookalikes are or how I might go about meeting one of them myself. (Perhaps my hypothetical clones are introverts too, or maybe people are put off when I share my not-particularly-serious hypothesis with them. Or maybe they're just being vague as a way of not having to make up white lies to cover what they perceive as a social faux pas on their part. Whatever.) However, yesterday at the hospital, I shared an elevator with a father and his ~10-year-old daughter. He was joking with her about aliens, and I chipped in some intended-as-funny remark. (The girl giggled, anyway.) Suddenly, the dad fixed me with The Look. I don't know what The Look really means, but by correlation I've determined that it signals someone's about to launch into a "Don't I know you from somewhere?" routine.

Well, this time, the guy was a little more forthcoming. Apparently, there is a Meredith-lookalike (and -soundalike!) who is a surgeon at Palo Alto Medical Foundation, and performed this guy's hernia surgery. I have to say, I prefer my job to hers. But, hey, even if he couldn't remember her name (I'll be honest, I don't remember the names of anyone who's cut me open, either), there can't be that many hernia surgeons at Palo Alto Medical Foundation, right?

Just one more thing to do in my Copious Free Time.

Also in my Copious Free Time, last night I fixed my watch. The Fossil Abacus WristPDA is a nifty gadget with a stylish face and band (well, if you like really chunky watches, but that's ok, I do), a 160x160 touchscreen, a USB adapter, Palm OS 4, and a couple of crippling design flaws. Said flaws include a really lousy battery which provides the watch with maybe 48 hours of operating time assuming really light usage, and which loses life with every recharge. I made the mistake of letting the battery drain down entirely and leaving it that way for a month or so, and when I checked it out again, I discovered that the watch would run over USB power, but the battery wouldn't hold even a minute's worth of charge. D'oh.

Conveniently, however, there is a WristPDA mailing list, and one of the hot topics for the last year has been how to do something about this battery-life problem. A number of people have been scouring Mouser and Digi-Key for appropriately-specced batteries -- there isn't much physical space inside the watch -- with little luck; it took a clever German hacker to come up with the idea of dropping in an iPod Shuffle battery. It's a little bit thick -- with the sticky mylar wrapping that serves as insulation, the whole thing raises the watch's backplate about 2mm -- but this watch was never anything remotely resembling waterproof in the first place, so this isn't exactly a crisis. (Dust is a different issue, and I don't know if anyone's addressed it.)

Anyway, I picked up a spare high-capacity (250mAh) Shuffle battery from some website, and a couple of days ago, enochsmiles made my little heart go pitter-pat with a shiny new soldering station complete with very-fine-point conical tips. (Most of the components in the watch are surface-mount, and the terminals on the battery are maybe 3mm long and about as thick as paperclip wire.) Last night, my .5mm solder and I got down to business, and the connexion checked out good on the first try. I plugged it in to charge, the screen lit up, nothing exploded, and I replaced all the settings. Twenty minutes later, the battery was still cool to the touch and encouragingly explosion-free, so I toddled off to bed to let it charge overnight.

This morning: success! The backplate is on, albeit with the expected gap, and appears to be mechanically stable. The watch works just fine (though getting it to hotsync with my Mac may still be a challenge...), and I will keep track of its battery life starting from about 10:30 this morning.

*happy battery-life dance*

(Oh, and for anyone looking to do this mod on their own Abacus, I used a first-generation Shuffle battery. I have not seen replacement batteries for the second-gen Shuffles yet, but I imagine their dimensions are smaller; then it becomes a question of capacity and output. If anyone happens to stumble across specs for one, would you let me know? Apple's website is, as usual, not especially forthcoming with this information.)