Free Candy For Everyone

Let this be a lesson to us all! After I went on and on about how awesome my Mac was, it promptly fell ill. About a week and a half ago I was just sitting on my couch, playing a game on my computer. All was well, though the fan was whirring at hyper-speed. Then there was a horrible “grrgrrgrrcrrcrrcrr” crunchy noise.

The machine was still going, nothing seemed broken. I just sat there looking at it. I continued playing for a minute or two thinking, “Did I just imagine that horrid noise? Yes, I must have imagined it.” But then I decided it was probably real and I cautiously tipped my laptop. The noise crrrrr’d out again. I exited the game and shut the whole thing down. Once everything stopped moving I carefully rotated the laptop around. I heard a small something moving around in there.

My guess was that something had broken free and had been hitting the fan. I figured it would be best to not turn her on again. I made an appointment at the Apple Store and brought her in last week. The guy at the “Genius Bar” was actually pretty bad. He was all “For us to look at this you’d need to leave this with us.” Um, yeah, ok. “For a week even!” Yeah, um, ok. There’s something BROKEN INSIDE OF IT! Take it! Finally, they did.

I got it back today and the replaced the internal fans. Guess it was a good thing I brought her in, after all. No charge, under warranty. Everything seems to be working right now, so I’ll just maintain cautious optimism.

Learn your lesson well! Be careful in your praise! Don’t let your gadgets know how much you love them lest they decide to test your devotion!

Probably no posts for a while. My laptop is unwell and temporarily out of service. Blogging this from my iphone which is not ideal. More info when I can actually type

“Macs are so cool” - a refrain I’ve found myself repeating several times over the last few days. I keep learning new and awesome things about my MacBook Pro. As I mentioned, I bought an iPhone this weekend. I brought it home and activated it. But all my phone numbers were still on my old cell phone. Oh noes!

Bluetooth to the rescue. My brother was over and he promptly loaded up my old phone, connected it to my Mac via Bluetooth and copied all my numbers over to my computer. That is so cool. Address Book was all loaded up with my phone numbers, I plugged in my phone and it synced right up. Yay, I love my Mac.

Then today I was IMing a friend using Adium and my brother asked why I hadn’t changed their names to the real names. I told him it’s because I don’t use this machine for chatting all that often. Then he lead me back to Address Book where, it turns out, if you put people’s IM info in their entries, it’ll immediately update the display names in Adium. Macs are so cool.

There are a million of these small simple convenience features on the Mac that surprise me all the time. I’m never surprised by my Windows machine - well, never pleasantly surprised, that is! There are things I’ll continue to use Windows for, of course. I use it at work, there are still more games for Windows, and I’m just more comfortable with all the ins and outs of the system. But Macs, oh Macs are so pretty. What a pretty pretty machine.

My PC is dying. Today was possibly the beginning of the end. The poor thing has had problems for quite some time - the motherboard chipset fan is prone to failure. It’s given out once before, and when I called the manufacturer about getting a replacement they didn’t even pause to ask questions except “What’s your address?” They promptly shipped out a new fan and I was on my way.

Well, my fan started making wacky noises a few months ago and I realized it was about time to get another one. But I’ve been mostly using my MacBook, so I never got around to it. I only turn the PC on once every few weeks at this point. Well. That was true up until a few weeks ago when I met up with Soren Johnson at AIIDE.

Soren was the lead designer as well as the main gameplay and AI engineer on Civilization IV. We had a nice long chat at the conference and it got me wanting to dig up my copy of Civ IV. I hadn’t really played it significantly when it first came up because I was in the depths of my WoW addiction. I managed to pause WoW long enough to play a few games of Civ through (and even write up a review and some more thoughts and then even more thoughts).

I’m no longer really playing WoW (yup, still WoW free. I think I’ve played once in the last 2 months) so I’m free for other games! I added a feature to the sidebar where I show what I’m playing, in fact. Civilization has been tops of that list for the last few weeks. Re-reading my initial thoughts, I don’t disagree much with my early assessment. I do think that my initial impressions of each new Civ game are always negative. “Why’d they change this? Where’s this favorite feature of mine??” Then I go away and come back to it and fall in love. It happened that way for me on Civ III and even Alpha Centauri. So my return to Civ IV has lead me to forgive it for some of the things that are different (though I still want my bullet point list from my more thoughts post implemented!).

Back to the stated topic though. I still don’t have Windows on my MacBook and I only have the Windows version of Civ IV so I’m forced to boot up my PC to play Civ. This means instead of only being turned on once every few weeks it’s been on several times a week. I was playing Civ on it last night, in fact, and it was a-ok.

Tonight I turned it on and got to the Windows loading screen with the little bar that bounces back and forth. I waited and waited. Then waited some more. Eventually the bar stopped bouncing but Windows never loaded. I rebooted and managed to load into Windows Safe Mode. “Now what?” I thought to myself. I uninstalled some stuff and removed everything from my Startup folder but to no avail. It still won’t run in un-safe mode.

Don’t really know how this could have anything to do with my failing fan, but maybe my computer overheated from the strenuous Civ workout and that caused unhappiness in the hard drive. Or somewhere else, who knows? I’m a software gal, hardware is strange and mysterious.

I’m not freaking out as much as I might expect. Probably because I love my MacBook Pro. But seriously, I need to do something about my PC. Troubleshooting tips, anyone?

A few months ago, I bought a MacBook Pro. I’ve been using it quite happily now for almost all my blogging, web browsing, and WoW playing. But today, it did something I hadn’t noticed before. The keyboard lit up. Automagically. Ooooh.

Apparently, there’s a light sensor on this thing so it detects low-light and turns on the glowy keys. I don’t usually sit around playing in the dark so I hadn’t seen it before. But how cool is that? Apple’s attention to details is pretty awesome. Pretty pretty laptop. I <3 my Mac.