Say hello to the first of the Horsemen

It’s the end of the world, folks. As I am creating this entry, I must keep telling the helpful beige-clad workers of this fine donut-based establishment that I do not, in fact, want more “coffee”. I sit and watch the busses come and go, the people come and go. As you may have guessed, what makes this entry particularly new and different is the fact that I am not writing it from the confines of my office. I have become unplugged, as it were. I have thrown off my earthly fetters and now am swimming freely wheresoever I choose, toting my new technology with me (although not actually swimming with it, of course). What makes this event so cataclysmic, so earth-shattering we must now wonder if those crazy preachers on the street corners downtown were right, is the fact that….well, there’s just no easy way to say this. I feel like I’ve become an apostate, as if my actions have damned me, and now I must look you in the eye and say this: I am typing on an iBook G4. My iBook G4.

Sit down, take a deep breath, drink some water. You’ll be over the shock in a minute.

It does not “work”, per se, however, so I feel less bad about it. I mean, it obviously works well enough for me to do what I am currently doing, but in the larger scheme of things, the “capable of still doing what it was created to do” sense, it does not work. I got it from one of my co-workers, who owned it for about a year, then it went haywire. He took it in to get it fixed by the minions at the apple store, and they did not, in fact, fix it, even though it was supposedly under warranty. They “discovered” (or planted) evidence that they computer had at one point gotten wet, which effectively and conveniently meant that they would not fix it for free. The projected cost of the repair was not dissimilar to the price of an entirely new mobile computing unit (MCU), and due to the fact that an MCU is absolutely vital to the work of said co-worker, he got himself a new one, and gave me the old one. Being the kind of person I am, I reverse-engineered it down to its constituent elements, unplugged things at random, and discovered that the wireless unit was the offending piece of hardware. Having removed it, all seems to be well. Actually, to be honest, the optical drive seems to have developed a new, disturbing habit of not ejecting my disks, which is annoying, to say the least, more so since this seems to be something that is somehow my fault, as it never did this before I subjected it to a lobotomy. So we’ll see how long it lasts. It may be that when I take it back apart in about 10 minutes I will irreversibly damage yet another piece of hardware. Once this thing works well for a few days, I’ll commit myself to it, but right now we’re still in the test phase.

Needless to say, for all those that are wondering, while it is nice to be able to work out of the office, there are more than a few things that this machine does and doesn’t do that drive me nuts. In fact, as yet, there is nothing that my MCU does that deeply impresses me, apart from the fact that it is mobile. But, beggar that I am, I cannot be a chooser.