iBook Back Kinda Sorta: A Romance

With the help of a friend, I was able to get the book proposal off my iBook—victim of a beer and cat-related spillage incident—without any drama yesterday. My trusty 5-year-old-plus laptop boots up fully and can drive an external VGA monitor, so whatever got toasted in the spill was neither the hard drive, the main logic board (Apple doesn't like to use WinTel terms like motherboard!!!! 'cuz that would be, like, so unJobsian), the memory nor the video card. So there is a connector between the video card and the screen itself that is out. If it's not a soldered connection, then the fix ought to be fairly affordable. If it's soldered, then it's time for a new laptop. That would suck. I've done the best writing of my life on that iBook. Writers are fairly superstitious creatures who need certain routines and habits in their daily lives—certain coffee cup, certain cigarettes, certain pens, certain keyboards—in order to function. So I would only give up my iBook—with its keys becoming non-responsive, its memory maxed at 512 MB, its processor an ancient 450 MHz G3—after trying what I could to make it run again. And, if that doesn't work, then I'm off to the store.

And, yes, I will be buying another Apple. I've been computing every day since 1983, often on a blend of PCs and Apples (I once used a Lisa at one job, no shit! and my dad owned one of the early Apple II+s. I also used the oringal PC and remember such fine chips as the 8088. I used both PC-DOS and MS-DOS). Apple, after many years, won the personal computer operating system race a couple of years ago when Mac OS X came out. It is close to flawless for most users. The forthcoming Vista release from Microsoft will be, per usual company history, buggy, will require many immediate security patches and updates, and will generally suck.

Meanwhile, many of my neighbors here in Seattle will be off all of next week and for two weeks at the end of the year, none of it counting against vacation time, because they work at Microsoft. Amazing what making shitty operating systems can get ya' in life.