Nate Beaty's Brainfag

Usual Strokes and Prods Prove Useless

posted in Home Jabber on May 22, 2006

Being a guilty cheapass doesn't always work out. In fact, sometimes you just come to a complete dead end in the rickety little pathway of making-do with oldworld castoff junk. You hit that deadend and you are faced with a choice: buy another aging, full of "character" device, and learn all the quirks and jerks of your new jalopy -- or succomb to your extreme Inner Geek and buy that overpriced cadillac with five thousand knobs and buttons and electronic doohickeys.

You guessed it, I just bought a Macbook Pro. And then sent away for a gold casing for my new cadillac's cajones: 2 gigabytes of 667 megahertz SODIMMs. Rrrow!

My old supergirlfriend, an 800mhz TiBook, reliable DAILY workhorse for more than THREE YEARS, had slowly turned into a cantankerous senile carmudgeon, often needing ten minutes of cajoling to get it to boot. Reset, reset, reset: CHIME! Black screen. Wait. Reset, reset, reset, reset, reset: CHIME! Hey, it boots!

Then, a few days ago, my usual strokes and prods were suddenly in vain. She wouldn't boot. Hours later, it randomly worked again, but I guess I pressed in on the case in just the wrong spot and ZZT! The screen goes all TRON, wonky warbled and useless, freezing up the ol' beast. Then it wouldn't boot at all. Google quickly confirms my worst fears: bad logic board. About a $300 fix.

More googling has brought worries that the Macbook Pro will be very very hot due to the over-splooging of thermal paste between sizzling hot chips and heatsinks, whiny at full speed and/or anything but max/min brightness, and easily unplugged while laptop-lounging. I'm hoping my refurbished model will have had some extra attention by Apple techs who fear the possible legal backlash from these notorious problems people are up in arms about.

My good friends Joseph and Mary from Astoria just blessed Soon Bok and I with four days of their funtastic and mongo-magnet presence. They found all sorts of treasures while roaming around such as a Sesame Street dance tape (tho I have no VCR or TV, I'll have to track one down now), a plastic scimitar, a tank-like ancient Powermac tower, lots of clothes, desks, castors: you name it.

Also I just hit the Olympia Comics Festival with Jonathan Hill and Jason Rainey. It was in an even smaller room than the last time I attended, two years ago, and seemed mostly populated with people roaming by from nearby seminars in the building, but still a good show. I sold some stuff, and met a bunch of cool cartoonists who happen to be new to the Portland area (including T Edward Bak and Ben Catmull, and Elijah Brubaker). Also in attendance were Jesse Recklaw and Andrice Arp (new to Portland as well), Dylan Williams and many other fine cartooning folk.

We just had the most insane downpour and lightning storm here -- and it lasted only five minutes. I scrambled to find AA batteries for my dumb, aging camera (perhaps the next item to hop from my janky path to my newfound cadillac mode), but no luck. Just as I pulled out my (also tank-like) Canon 35mm, it stopped.