I know FallenOne (is that you in the photo?) has found his phone by now... :-D but since BloodLine always has his foot on the ground, I might as well continue with his line of thought:
I recommend getting in touch with these guys in case you're searching for weak EM fields:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TEMPESTI know a couple of people who were somewhat involved with the project. Yes, their stories are SCARY.
As for Andeda's comment:
I totally agree. Let your background brain tasks figure out the solution. Whenever I have a snag in programming or some other involved task, I sleep it off or go do something completely unrelated. When I come back to the problem it takes only minutes if not seconds to find the solution.
Case and point: the other day I bought a mixer for someone which was supposed to be semifunctional, and since I can fix just about anything (my precious Amigas!), I figured I could easily tackle this little motorized daemon. Opened'er up and spent about 20 minutes trying to find out why the multi-speed switch didn't work in all states. No go. I pressed, pushed, soldered, cleaned, wiped, prayed. Nothing.
Left it for another day. A few days later I came back to it and it literally took me 3-4 minutes before noticing that a transistor had one of its legs broken (due to it being easily moved back and forth when opening the damn thing). Soldered it and voila! It worked right away!
And now to A4000_Mad's hillarious comments:
That (looking inside the fridge, etc) is when you know a programmer has one NASTY bug (that, or he's completely incompetent!). I've finally realized that I'm doing this when I unconsciouly start changing the formatting of my code while trying to find a bug. That's when I, nowadays, take the above-mentioned break! :-)
BTW, there's one more method for finding things that really works, but I can't reveal that. (and no, I'm not talking about ESP)
Oh, and one last lesson I've learned when it comes to patterns in finding things: when something is falling or has fallen and it bounced and I caught a glimpse of the whole thing, it's *NEVER* where I initially thing it might be. NEVER. NEVER. Always somewhere else. Damn it! :-D
