It was the laptop, too
In a Neal Stephenson-ish twist of fate, I happily connect my Macbook Pro’s new charger and discover that the power socket on the laptop is damaged.
…thank you, Apple.
Oh, for sure I’m kicking myself for not purchasing Applecare. After eight years in Currys I have a very fine idea of the worth of an extended warranty for a laptop, especially in consideration of the typical cost of repair, but for some ineffable reason I decided to not purchase it (actually it comes to mind now that the sales assistant in the Apple store mentioned it didn’t cover internationally).
I wouldn’t say I’m screwed; to describe the fault, I’ll say that the power connection on the laptop looks slightly distended and needs to be jiggled before power will go into the machine. If it’s a case of that there’s just a wire loose, the repair will be less expensive. If Apple decide the mainboard needs replacing, I should just start hunting for a replacement right now…
Back to Apple. You’re not off the hook.
Your 85W Magsafe power charger is a piece of crap - nearly every review of it on the Apple Store, Amazon and elsewhere is negative, and our own experiences with it are scarcely better. It’s flimsy, the head is easily damaged, and your practice of (first) using a proprietary head and (second) refusing to license the patent involved leaves Macbook owners in a nasty situation. The only two ways we have are to purchase another flimsy charger for $80+tax through the Apple store and wait a few weeks for it, or purchase a new or used one from a reseller, and hope it works.
Bastards..? Yes, absolutely. I love OS X, and short of Adobe Photoshop being released natively on the Linux platform it’s going to remain my first choice of OS, but the bulk of your peripheral hardware is plastic junk. Sure, they have a definite look and style, but it’s one which unfortunately screams “cheap!” in twenty-point lettering. In a tacky and non-aliased font, to boot.
A phoblog without photos is a lonely one
The dry spell is nearly at any end, my laptop’s charger should be here tomorrow. Once it’s here I can finish some very outstanding processing and printing works.
But truth be told it’s been nice to hang up the camera for a spell and not have to go snapping the kids or anything else for that matter. I haven’t even been looking at anyone else’s works in that time, for that matter, outside of trolling randomly on photographic forums.
“How is my photo?”
“It needs more truthiness!”
Har.
Of all things, I’ve been working on a short story that I’ve had in mind for some time. I’m particular about my science-fiction - it must be a certain kind of hard, or a certain kind of soft…it’s like porn with ray guns, now that I think about it. There’s good porn, bad porn, and downright nasty porn that you’ll eternally regret watching.
So, as far as hard sci-fi goes, I like the entire book to be realistically believable. What do I mean? As a Linux and general computer geek, I have a good grasp of what the actual state of the art is, which is incidentally why I think that Hollywood writers as a whole should be put through a few CompSci classes.
I’m an armchair astronomer and again, I have a fair idea of the technical and practical difficulties involved in space flight. Even something seemingly trivial, say beaming a photograph back to Earth, is an involved process. To quote an email from the Cassini imaging team:
The spacecraft points its high gain antenna toward Earth and transmits the data from all of its instruments, as well as information about the operational status of the spacecraft. These telemetry signals make their way across 1.6 billion kilometers of space and are received by the giant dish antennas of the Deep Space Network. These packets of telemetry are piped to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, where they are “unpacked.” Raw ISS image files are assembled from the data stream and are forwarded to CICLOPS…
I want my story to have a solid base, grounded in established facts. It’s honestly a daunting task,because the more I learn, the I need to learn. Do you know what a planetary magnetic wake is, and what it’s relationship is to protecting people from the hard radiation of a gas giant’s magnetosphere?
It’s something I happily do as I’ve always found anything related to space fascinatingn and before me is as good as reason as any to buff up on it. There is a line though. At some point I have to bend the rules in favour of telling a good story. It’s great that I might educate you a little on some of these things in the course of telling you a story, but if you want a wanton deluge of facts, just go follow links on Wikipedia for a few hours.
There’s an even hazier line to be found in Things You Don’t Need to Know. In his excellent novel Titan, Stephen Baxter spares nothing in immersing you in the story of a hobbled-together mission to Titan, including detailed sections of the effect of sustained nutritional deficiency in low and zero-gravity environments. In layman’s terms, zero-g diarrhoea. It’s something that brings home their dire situation and adds another level of involvement, but it’s also something that personally made me step back: I want escapism, not poop stories!
Technical and scientific facts aside, there’s a more subtle difficulty: The mindset of the protagonists. To put it to you directly, the author is affected by his world, and this in turn influences the characters. I’m a young person from a western society who has twenty four hour access to a little thing called the internet. I have immediate and arbitrary to information, communication, entertainment in just about any audio-visual and text format I care to name. That influences me, and it would influence my characters also. How would you react in moving from an environment saturated with instantly available information to one where, at best, there’s a twenty minute time lag..each way?
If I look back to books written before the invention of the internet that are set in quasi-modern times and settings, the characters look dated. Their reactions to events and thought processes aren’t what they would really be if the book was written today. It’s an odd and personal peeve.
Those are my challenges, or at least the first ones to rear their heads.
Oh Linux, how I miss thee
I’ve decided to reinstall Gentoo Linux. It basically came down to a choice between a new MMOG, and reacquainting myself with Linux, and it’s easier to go AFK from a compilation, than from a quest party.
Better yet, I actually have a practical reason for it - I want to set up a network file server once we have a place of our own, and I’d like to brush up on Shorewall, Image Magick and other and funner utilities.
It’ll be Gentoo again, I guess, as Ubuntu invariably Breaks Things when I install it.
Woe is me.
Drunk drivers
You are mother fuckers, one and all.
I don’t care that you love your daughter and would never hurt her, that you own six cats and would never hurt them, that hey, I have this cat here you can have to replace yours, that I’m going through hard times right now, that I’m really sorry, I didn’t notice hitting anything and why are you shouting at me. It doesn’t give you fucking leeway to do 50 through a 15 mph area and run down my cat.
We loved Scooter. He was one of the most absolutely friendly and playful cats I’ve ever had a joy to know in my life - it was nearly a daily thing that we would see him at a neighbour’s house and playing with their children.
Mariah rescued both him and another of his litter from death’s door and bottle fed them back to health. Caira loved him. He was her play pal, you know. He never bit her or clawed her - a true rarity for our eclectic selection of cats - and she loved nothing more than to just hug him.
Everyone else here loved Scooter too. You’d never get him to admit it, but even Mariah’s dad loved the cat, and he’s a curmudgeon in the finest sense of the tradition.
So thank you. You ran down my daughter’s cat in front of her. Watching Scooter bleed out and die on the pavement, and knowing I couldn’t help him, was one of the absolute worst moments of my life.
Thank you, you son of a bitch.
Scooter
Me, elsewhere
