Author: chuck goolsbee

Making do

OK, I’m beyond a full week now without my PowerBook.

You know the last time I had a powerbook repaired was back in the “bad old days” of a “beleaguered Apple” (remember those?) This was during the rampant fiasco that was the PowerBook 5300. No, I never used one of those, I was a Duo/2400c kind of guy, but I managed a fleet of laptops at my then employer… mostly PowerBooks, but also Toshibas and IBM ThinkPads. The 5300 was Apple’s best sales tool for selling Toshibas and ThinkPads… gawd it was awful. I think I saw more users switch to Windows 95 due to the 5300 than any other cause. Apple, to its credit did have several repair programs in place for that model though. Based on that experience, the current one is horrible… it is making me yearn for the “bad old days! of 1996!

How? Well back then Apple didn’t have retail stores. You didn’t have to schedule yourself to see the “genius”, or wait for days or even weeks to get your laptop fixed. You called an 800 number, the next day a shipping box would arrive, all ready for your laptop. You would drop your powerbook into the foam container, seal the box and hand it back to the FedEx guy. Literally no more than THREE days later, you had your PowerBook 5300 back. Mind you, it was still a PowerBook 5300, which means it still sucked, but at least you had it back!

I’m now 8 days into my life without my laptop and there is no end in sight.

In the meantime, I’m living with the wheezing old TiBook, which clings to life by the skin of its titanium, um… skin. As I said before, it really can’t be called a laptop anymore since it refuses to run on battery power. It also sits on the verge of meltdown due to badly overheating. I have removed the keyboard from it in an attempt to keep it cool (and running!) Yesterday I found a big heat sink off an Intel server and greased it onto the CPU.

Above: My battered, wheezing, old TiBook, sporting a server-sized heat sink. Resting on it you can see my “Genius Bar Work Authorization.”

Today I am experimenting with using the parts scavenged from my old XK engine rebuild as heat sinks. The camshafts are too heavy, but the valves are doing an excellent job of maintaining CPU temps below 115° F. Plus they look cool. Maybe I’ll shoot a pic for a future entry.

If this were 1996, I’d have had my PowerBook back at least 4 days ago. As it is 10 years later, It looks like it could be another week.

Above: My repair status page at Apple.com. “On Hold, part on Order.

Let’s hope the TiBook doesn’t spontaneously combust before its replacement gets back. It damn well better get back before mid-February when I go on vacation! I would rather not bring a wheezing, overheated TiBook and external firewire drive with me. Not to mention a few pounds of metal to act as heat sinks. 😛

Tetris with/on wheels

I love the video game Tetris, the old Russian puzzle game based on blocks of four. When I worked at Nintendo back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and 16/32/64-bit systems were still over the horizon, one of the benefits of my job was sitting at my desk playing with the (yet unreleased) GameBoy. The only GamePakâ„¢ I had was Tetris, but that is all I needed or wanted. Whenever I got on the phone I’d pick up the GameBoy and start stacking bricks. I still do that today, but usually with the “Breakout”-style games on my Treo or iPod. The game takes away my lizard-brain need to fidget with something while my mammalian brain can concentrate on talking. If you call me at work, and the conversation goes for more than a couple of minutes, I’m smashing bricks on my Treo, almost guaranteed. Weird I know, but that is how I work. I should write some discourse sometime about fidgety behaviors, but not today.

Today I played Tetris in real time with two complete tire/wheel or tire sets of FOUR each… that is FOUR Dayton 6″ stainless steel wire wheels, with some old worn Pirelli p4000 super touring tires mounted. FOUR new Pirelli p4000 super touring tires (wrapped in pairs for added Tetris difficulty!) THREE empty 5 gallon buckets (for my home-brew Diesel rig) and ONE 5 gallon Diesel can. Plus myself, my two bags, and extra set of shoes. All this I stacked into my 2002 Volkswagen Jetta TDi for a run into Seattle. I dropped the wheels and tires off at Foster’s Wheel Service for mounting. All the Seattle Jag club folks I talked to suggested Fosters, so there I went. (Actually I did get a suggestion for a place down in Kent, but that is a bit of a drive for me coming down from Arlington!) I dropped off my wheels and one of my signed copies of the KZOK Classic Car Calendar for them.

Amazingly, it all came out a lot faster than it went in, but before I left I took some photos of the FOUR by THREE configuration in the car (Any hard core Tetris player would know why I didn’t dare stack another set of FOUR things in there!:

It may be a boring looking, Teutonically efficient (52 MPG on veggie oil), dull little car, but those Germans do design it to be very useful. Gotta admire that to some degree. There is no way I could have squeezed that load into a Toyota or Honda of equivalent size.

I agree with Paul Wigton’s dad in that life is too short to drive a boring car, which is why I have the Jag. But you will note that I don’t drive it to work more than once or twice a year. 😉

Separation Anxiety

I dropped my ailing laptop off at the Apple Store in Southcenter today at lunch. Last night I imaged the HDD onto an external drive, and was pleasantly surprised that it booted my old, wheezing, battered Titanium G4 PowerBook. If you recall, this laptop isn’t really a “laptop” anymore, since it will not run on anything but AC power. It also has several broken ports (USB and power mostly) and frequently fails to function. Let’s hope it survives long enough for my 15″ “AlBook” to return home.

I must admit, I felt a significant wave of anxiety wash over me as I left the mall and headed to my car. I’m usually not a very anxious guy, but this particular machine is what allows me to do my work, and I admit to being somewhat attached to it. Odd feeling really.

The drop-off experience was less than perfect, but I think that Apple didn’t really think out the whole after-sales support part of the Retail game… least of all with these “mini stores.” What should have taken 15 minutes dragged out into 90 minutes. Can’t fault the staff at the store for that though… they were fine.

Reading update

Along with not updating the web log lately, I have neglected to update my reading link. I finished “Castles of Steel” over the New Years’ Holiday. My friend John Welch (see blog roll) sent me two books for Christmas which I’m into now. One is James Madison’s personal notes from the debates which produced the US Constitution. The U.S.C. is one of my favorite documents ever written, and it bears multiple readings, along with the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. If frustrates me to no end that our current President seems willing to violate the terms of the agreement he swore to uphold in his Oath of Office. We spent millions to impeach the previous officeholder for much lighter crimes. Oh well.. this isn’t a Political Blog, so I’ll leave it at that. I could never write a political blog… because nobody understands my politics it seems. My Democrat friends are all convinced I’m a Republican, and my Republican friends all swear I’m a Democrat. I’m so far out of both camps that I find it not worth trying to define to them because they all want to mold me into one or the other. Political opinion is NOT binary, though it seems so many Americans believe it has to be.

Anyway, it is fascinating reading to hear about what issues were important at the time, and how they affected the debate, and how the framers distilled the issues into language that was applicable yet open to be used to handle issues that they had no idea would even exist 200+ years later.

Good timing for a bad event

My 15″ Powerbook, which I bought in September, chose the morning of the day I was to speak at Macworld Expo to die.

Well, not die really, but have what most would consider to be a “near death experience.”

I was in my hotel room, checking email when it sort of half-kernel panicked. Sort of? Let me explain… When you Kernel Panic, the MacOS kind of greys your screen then pops a multi-lingual error message that basically says: “Reboot your computer, sorry.” This time it greyed, but never asked for the reboot. I’ve never seen it do that before. I power cycled it, but it just chimed and blinked at me. GREAT. A few hours prior to my session and my laptop is dead.

Being a somewhat competent network geek, I always have backups, but of course they were a thousand miles away in my Seattle office, and I was in a hotel in San Francisco, scheduled to speak at the MacIT conference in a few hours. Even if I could get my data, and I needed a functional machine to put it on.

Of course I created this situation. How? I usually travel with a backup hard drive, a burned CD of my preso, repair utilities, a full mobile repair kit, etc. My sturdy computer/messenger bag is almost always stuffed with handy “save my ass” stuff. Except that I never use them so I left them behind this year. Bad move obviously!

So I found the local Apple Store and walked over from my hotel, hoping to get it diagnosed. I walk in, and go up to the “Genius Bar”… only to find out they are booked through to the following afternoon! (sigh) So I walk towards Moscone, stop at a drugstore and buy a set of jewelers’ screwdrivers, and figure I’ll be doing it myself. Once in the speaker’s lounge I am of course surrounded by Mac geeks who as soon as they hear the chime identify it as a RAM issue. (digital.forest client Schoun Regan was the first to offer that diagnosis actually, thanks Schoun!)

It turns out this is a fairly common issue: The infamous “empty lower slot” error in 15″ aluminum G4 powerbooks. Some Googling revealed this to be a terrifyingly common problem. It seems there are a lot of folks who have this (all with 15″, 1.5 Ghz G4 powerbooks), and Apple has not acknowledged it as a defect (yet.) I moved my RAM chip from the lower to the upper slot and instead of chimes of death, I was greeted with the familiar happy chord that a Mac makes when booting. So at least I could continue, deliver my session, and get on with life… though with a non-functional memory slot.

The irony, besides the day-of-session timing, was that the day before I bought another 512mb of RAM for the laptop and was looking forward to installing it upon my return to Seattle. So until I get this fixed I can’t use this RAM. =\ I considered returning the RAM for a 1GB SODIMM, but never had the time to get out around to it.

fast-forward two weeks

Another MacIT speaker who was at the table when I was fixing the powerbook, Dave Pooser iChatted me yesterday that Apple has finally copped to the problem and has created a repair extension program for the issue. I printed out that page and went over to the Apple Store near my office tonight. The “Genius” there only had a one-hour wait, so I signed up and hung out until he had a moment to look at my powerbook. True to every “intermittent” issue, when we moved the DIMM to the lower slot, the damn thing booted just fine… five times in a row. He sort of shrugged and said “if it happens again, bring it in.” Thankfully about 10 minutes later as I was still sitting there talking with him, the powerbook just turned itself off at random, then refused to boot, giving the same chimes. Convinced, he created a work order for it and was preparing to ship it off for repair. He asked me if I had a backup, and I said “at my office, sure.” I asked how long it would take, and he speculates a week or so. I told him my office was very close, so why don’t I go over there, make sure I have a good clone of the machine and something I can work from in the meantime, and bring it back tomorrow. He agreed, so here I am about to clone my drive and make an attempt to run on my battered old “titanium” powerbook for a week or so. It died last summer with a complete loss of power… won’t run off battery, and only occasionally runs of AC power. Should be an entertaining week.

I’ll let you know when the repaired G4 comes back.

Screamin’ deal on an Xserve

A supplier we use has a bunch of Xserve Cluster Nodes; Dual CPU G5, 2 gigs of RAM, 80gb disk… 33% off retail.

Since you hardly ever see Apple gear at more than 10% to 15% off, this is a great buy. We are buying a bunch for ourselves, and if anyone is interested in grabbing one or more, let me know. Send email to: cg at forest dot net.