Once every few months, I get a case of what I call "The Digital 'Dropsies'", named after the problem that can temporarily affect a previously sure-handed wide receiver. During this affliction, which usually lasts about 24 hours, every technical thing I try to accomplish seems to encounter unexpected hurdles, bizarre failures, simple mistakes that get magnified into serious issues, or all of the above. Nothing that happens is critical. It's not massive data loss or huge setbacks, just a serious of breakdowns that make me want to get away from technology for the rest of the day.

I had one of those days yesterday, and I'm just now recovering from the effects. Here are some of the highlights:

• I was working on an AWS EC2 instance (a virtual server instance hosted with the Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud) and needed a non-standard port open. Instead of just looking up the right way to do it, I just tried figured I would use the usual tools on the Fedora Core 4 image I was connecting with. So I ran the firewall config tool, set the port to open and saved it. Somehow I managed to accidentally wind up with a machine will all ports filtered, so I lost my ability to connect with ssh, which apparently with an EC2 instance is equivalent to"bricking" it. There was not yet any critical data on that machine, but I was forced to get a new instance created and reupload and reconfigure a bunch of stuff.
• I wanted to try out Ubuntu Gutsy, so I torrented and burned a copy of the live CD. I ran the live version, and then set it to install. Halfway through, I wound up with an I/O error, and so I ran a consistency check on the CD, which turned out to be invalid. I don't think I've ever had that happen before.
• Instead I decided to install Fedora Core 8, so I kicked off a torrent download. About 10 minutes in it crashed my network. I restarted my router and it completed without issue.
• I had the aforementioned problem with Windows Tablet edition getting locked up with some kind of DVD driver conflict. For those interested, I did resolve it, but only by running msconfig and disabling all startup items. I'm still not sure which of those processes is to blame, and I don't have time for a binary search right now.

Fortunately, it vanished as quickly as it came. Today I was able to fix the DVD problem, along with resolving a host of other nagging issues. Most importantly, Fedora Core 8 is excellent, even allowing my tablet to suspend/resume without issue out of the box, something no previous release could do. Combined with having my machine set up to effectively develop in two different environments (Linux + Eclipse/Windows + Visual Studio), it was actually worth all the trouble I went through yesterday.