The damned dog woke me up at 630, so I decided that I could get some time on the computer without interruption.
One thing that is unclear in the instructions is how Odin doesn't seem to like to stay connected when you reboot. At some point I think i should have pulled the USB cable when the phone rebooted the first time. When it came back up, Odin failed to transfer the second file. The phone was unhappy, too. I pulled the usb cable then and it was essentially bricked. The yellow area regarding pulling the battery did fix everything, but I assume that step would be unnecessary if I understood when to have pulled the USB cable after the kernel update.
Regardless, I about sh it when the screen came up with a walkie-talkie connected to the trs80 with the exclamation point in the middle. Very happy that pulling the battery out fixed that.
I never could get windows to recognize my phone just through the "mass storage" usb connection. Luckily, crap cable or not, the phone does connect in download mode. I ended up taking out the sd card and putting it into the adapter and putting the su...zip file on the card that way.
One question. In the bug thread, Rando said:
download the other files in the video: the superuser app zip file (the root), the Custom Recovery file tar file, the clean kernel zip file (you must install this first to prevent you from losing root on your next reboot -- one other good thing about this kernel flash is that it also fixes skipping keyboard letters when you text too fast), and the GPS_fix.zip.
So, after going through the process in this thread, have I collaterally fixed the GPS issue? I am able to get a lock on 3 satellites here in my kitchen and I am sure it was zero before. I was wondering if the lock would be persistent longer then the 15 minutes I was getting before.
Even if it doesn't I feel like the exercise was worth it. I appreciate the guidance. I may go as far as trying out some of the ROMs to see if I can get the stability I need without having the screw around with this phone every weekend.
Thanks again.