Last night we watched an NBC Dateline special about the 40 years of Tom Brokaw’s career. It was quite good. But George H.W. Bush (you know, the first one) had a rather odd thing to say about his invasion of Iraq in the early 1990s:
Desert Storm was executed with such precision and handled so well by our brilliant military forces that it helped to dispell the negative attitude towards war started by Vietnam.”
[Or something very much like that. You know what my memory’s like.]
Can I get a say WHAT?!? If anything the George Bushs’s insertions into middle-east countries has only served to increase people’s disdain. At least with all of the people that I know, and the 49% of Americans who voted for Kerry earlier this month.
And also:
In a story in The Globe and Mail about Apple launching its iTunes Music Store here in Canad I found this little tidbit by a man named Kaan Yigit. He’s the president of Solutions Research Group, a technology market research outfit in Toronto, and commenting on how the three current digital music download outfits may fare once Apple throws in its hat.
Ultimately, once [Apple] is established they will be the dominant player, like they are in every market they’re in.”
I can only wish that that was true. It is true that the iPod is the most popular portable MP3 player in the world, whether hard-disk or card based. And it’s true that the iTunes Music Store is huge in the US and Europe.
But, while Apple computer hardware is very well-respected and in high use in education and government, their share of the personal computer market has always been quite low (5 - 17%, depending on who you ask).
A percentage that I try and help raise every time I walk past Macstation, or I have a friend who needs a new computer.
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Shortly after I wrote that last entry I took Stewie off to the Computer ER. Stewie was in the hospital. I was told when I dropped him off that it probably wasn’t the logic board, but the processor board. The good news was that it would cost a little less were this the case. And there was a possibility I could have him back by the end of the week.
Yesterday I got a call from the guy at the place with the thing and he told me that he couldn’t find a single thing wrong with my PowerBook. After I’d been having all of those problems, he couldn’t reproduce a single one. Now, I’m not new to troubleshooting computers. And I know the difference between a genuine computer problem and a computer user who’s not doing something quite right.
Mine was a genuine problem. And he made me feel like it was me, not doing something quite right.
The good news, though, is that they only charged me for the diagnostic testing. $50.
So today we hied ourselves back and picked him up. I got him all set up again about 48 hours after he was dropped off. (But before we left I tried reproducing the problem myself, with the repair guy watching. Nothing.)
One of the first things that I noticed when I first started him up is that one of the tests that they had run on the PowerBook totally hosed my OS X installation. This is partly my fault: I’d left it set to OS 9, and probably didn’t tell them that I run a dual-boot system. So I’m OK with that. But it did mean that I had to spend most of my afternoon and evening reinstalling OS X and setting it back up.
And then he crashed, in the middle of an OS update.
And wouldn’t boot. Nothing. Right back to square one. Startup chime, black screen. No video. No disk activity. Sweet. Squat. All.
And I can’t take him back in until Monday, since the service department isn’t open on weekends.
Aargh!
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By now you’re probably thinking, “Hey! It’s Wednesday. He said he was going to try booting the PowerBook back on Saturday. I wonder whatever happened?”
Yeah: it didn’t work.
So I stayed silent here about it until there was a plan. Where was I going to get a new logic board? Who was going to install it? What if that doesn’t work?
And now there’s a plan.
I’ve made arrangements with a local service depot to run some diagnostic tests on the ‘Book and confirm that the logic board is the problem. And then put a new one in. So it’s going to be a little while before my beloved little Stewie is back on his feet.
It’ll take them a few days to get to the tests. Then, once they confirm the problem, they have to order the new board. Which will take another few days. And some more time will elapse while they work their way through the service queue to Stewie. This whole thing could be as long as two weeks or so.
But if he comes back in working order it’ll all have been worth it.
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