Tuesday, February 09, 2010

Racoons, Broken MacBook Pro, Stuff

A raccoon woke us up a couple nights ago at 3am because the chicken it was trying to kill/steal/eat was so loud. We scared off the raccoon enough to find the chicken, decide it was too hurt to live, and then I got the job of killing it. So that all sucked.

I fired up my MacBook Pro once we were back inside. I was either going to google up stuff about raccoons or maybe write up the story here. The screen was black though. I rebooted and tried other smart stuff and nothing worked. I plugged in the external monitor and nothing. I guessed it was the crappy Nvidia 8600M chip problem that lots of other people have had on Macs and other laptops. They used bad solder or did something low quality.

I was hoping my suspicions were true because my laptop is out of warranty but the Nvidia issue is covered for 3 years. Anyway, the Apple store confirmed that it was the 8600M graphics chip and they'd replace the logic board for free.

They told me they had to wait for the logic board to arrive but it would get there the next day (Saturday) or on Monday. It arrived Tuesday which wouldn't have bugged me but they'd gotten my hopes up of a much quicker repair. I got a call Tuesday night 20 minutes before they close to say it was fixed. I rushed over and it looked like it was working okay and brought it home. They mentioned on the phone and at the store that they thought it had bad RAM and I should get it replaced (for free under warranty) by Crucial (the manufacturer). That seemed weird because I haven't had any random crashes or other nutty behavior.

At home I decided to boot the Mac OS X 10.6 install disk and see if it had a RAM test like I had read online. I started to push the DVD in and got nothin'. Normally the DVD gets sucked in automatically. It didn't work, didn't work from Windows and doesn't show up in the System Profiler either. So either they broke my DVD drive or more likely they didn't connect it to the replacement motherboard. :( It's not a big deal but it's just another thing I have to resolve now.

Thursday, February 04, 2010

Jonah and Wishes

On the way to school today Jonah said if he had a wish he would wish for more wishes.

Then he said he would wish for:

  • Being able to eat all the junk food he wanted without getting sick and so he'd still grow and be healthy
  • That heaven was real
  • That he was a clone*

    The middle one there made me almost cry. We've had (grown up) friends who have died in the last few years and it's definitely gotten our whole family, including Jonah, thinking about what happens when we die, or someone else dies. And what does that mean, and what happens? And it's scary.

    * Well... cooler than just a clone. A Clone Trooper, like from Star Wars. I asked "Wouldn't it be bad to be a copy of the same person?" and he said "I'd have a lot of brothers."