Electronic

I've had some pretty bad luck as far as my electronics go lately...
It all started with the camera. The two-month-new camera. I had it in photography class (a little bit of a coincidence), and then I turned it on like every time before, but it vibrated for about 4 seconds before coming on. That's not what it's supposed to do. So of course I'm thinking, "Great, I broke it already." Luckily, it still worked as far as I could tell. I knew it had to be the Super SteadyShot function that "shakes" or moves the CCD to clean it or stabilize the image respectively. I looked it up in the manual (another coincidence that what we went over in class that day was reading the manual and troubleshooting), and I found out that that function was not functioning. So I had to send it in to have it fixed. It was under warranty, but I really missed having it.
I think next came the headphones. The last pair of the little ones that I had I broke. I was trying to clean the left earpiece, and the speaker front broke off, and that ear never worked again. This time, I was listening to it on the bus when suddenly the sound got raspy and quieter. The next time I listened to it it was fine again for a little bit before going raspy. I thought that it was my flash player that was breaking, but I realized that it's just the headphones. They were a really nice set, but at least they're cheap.
I think the biggest annoyance of all was this motherboard I got from school. I powered it up the first time and tooled through the BIOS, and it appeared to be a very nice one. Just as I was going to save it, though, it froze. The BIOS is not supposed to freeze. I didn't know if it was something I did or what, and it didn't boot back up again. Frustrated but perseverant, I took a good look at the motherboard. I noticed the big capacitors all had yellow-brown stuff coming out of the tops. I didn't think that was supposed to happen, and I was right. I learned all about the whole bad capacitors fiasco, and that I'd have to replace them. My ambitious self decided to get right to it. I found a place to get some computer grade capacitors and set about getting the old ones off. They went fine until the last two, where I was unable to get a hole through the solder. I tried heating up a pin to push through, but it went nowhere. I then tried touching that pin. Oops. Yeah, it was hot. At least it was only a pin head. I did eventually get them cleaned out with some help, though. When the new ones came, I was very excited. I then put them ones in, powered it up, and it just sat there with the fan running. I tried again and again until the fan didn't come on. After all that work, I had gone backwards. So I set it aside for a while. I switched to a faster computer and came back to it later. This time it worked again (something about actually attaching the power switch), and I was able to run a live CD and then shut down without problems (unless you call the horrible onboard graphics a problem, which I don't, because I've got the GeForce FX 5200 to put in). I was surprised, and switched to the new computer, only to find that after that it again refused to do anything after powering on. So I had to switch back again to the other computer. I couldn't figure out why it wouldn't work. Somewhere in here I decided to test it again, and it wouldn't turn on. So I tried again, and it did, but it started smoking. After intense calculation on the issue I decided to use the 5-second hard off instead of the 1-second unplug. I found that I had just set the RAM in the slot without really seating it... backwards. It turns out that this aligns the power connections with non-power connections, resulting in the connection actually burning out. And that's how I fried my first stick of RAM. I'm going to use it for bling. I tested the other capacitors on the board and found them ranging from bad to ridiculous. I'll try replacing those and hope that, A: I haven't fried/broken anything else on this board since it worked, and 2: that's all that it needs to work.
Still feeling isolated. Still feeling a bit hopeless.
I guess I'll update the quotes tomorrow. We've got practice pretty much every day until the musical in November, so that'll be fun, since I can neither dance nor sing. We've also got a few marching band things coming up, too. I really don't think we're as good this year as we were last year. And then SchoBo starts. We've also got 5 different projects due during approximately that time period. Yay.