more mac weirdness

Last night, I watched a dvd on my mac... it worked. Also playing RealAudio. This is good.

Today I unplugged the mac in my bedroom and went out to the living room. I ejected the dvd and then... the screen went black. I hit the spacebar, nothing. I moved the display for no particular reason, and I heard the beginnings of the happy-mac chime... but it was cut off. Then it restarts again -- or did I hit the button? No, I don't think I hit the restart button... and it boots okay, except that the date has been reset to 1969.

This is a mac with hardware trouble.

consistent failure

The mac gets through importing five or six or seven songs, then hangs on the next song.
For the record, this is iTunes 4.71 and mac os x 10.3.7, and I've had the same behavior on too many cd's. Only two (both of which were Yo-Yo Ma albums) were imported completely and successfully.

MY MAC IS NOT FIXED.

say it ain't so

Remember about my mac being fixed? You know, this morning?
It's hosed again, hosed as in, gets stuck importing perfectly normal cd's, and can't be stopped, and won't eject the cd until I force-quit a few times and maybe restart a few times.
Here's what I've done since I got it back:

• switched out the battery with the replacement battery


• updated to 10.3 using the 10.3 retail install disks


• ran software update


• restarted, ran software update some more, restarted again


• installed firefox & some other software mentioned above


• plugged in my ipod, ran podworks, discovered that podworks didn't see the ipod, resigned myself to re-importing the few albums already on the ipod

With that all done, I said to myself, great, it's time to start importing music. I take a cd I burned from my pc a few weeks ago, my favorite Yo-Yo Ma concerto and American Idiot. I set the mac to import to 128 bps mp3's, because my ears can't tell the difference. It importants the concerto, and the title track of American Idiot, then... no more -- iTunes hangs, I can't eject the CD, I can't even force-quit iTunes. I think after ten minutes of trying I get iTunes to shut down and eject the cd... I import Yo-Yo Ma Plays Bach succesfully, then go for The Thrills, So Much for the City. It gets up to the fifth song, "Say it Ain't So," and then just seems to get stuck on that song. It stays on importing that song for many minutes, although it still makes cd-accessing-sounds. I force quit iTunes, then run it again, and re-start the import at "Say It Ain't So." Same deal -- just seems to get stuck importing.
I notice, meanwhile, that the machine is getting hot. Somewhere around 120-140 -- not hot enough to boil water, but hotter than you'd want bathwater. The repair depot replaced "everything related to the heat sink" yesterday so I don't understand what's going on.
The whole time I've been writing this entry, it's still been trying to import that one song.
I think my mac is past the point of no return -- it's been repaird by apple twice in the last month, and has never really recovered from whatever originally went wrong this summer. I think I'm screwed.
Please, Apple, say it ain't so.

my mac is back!

My mac came back and it works now!
I installed 10.3, upgraded to 10.3.7, and now I'm installing all the sweetness:
fire
ecto
Cocoalicious
PodWorks
and generally raiding joi ito's list of favorites. I've never met joi, don't know joi's gender or age or anything, but somehow I've learned that if joi likes software, I probably will too.
now, what shall I use for an RSS reader? I think I bought a license to StickyBrain a while ago. And NetNewsWire.
My god, this two year old mac is so much more fantastic than my brand new tablet pc.
**rejoices**

Cavewriting and del.icio.us

I finally wrote some documentation for the cavewriting software I’ve been working on, for Noah ’s Cavewriting class. I’ve also started using del.icio.us for bookmarks I can access anywhere. I’m also trying out basecamp, to manage projects; it provides a shared, prioritized, web-based todo list. Basecamp’s little brother is tada lists, which is just plain lists, but simple and clean.

As for the mac saga: Apple has my computer and lists the status as “in repair.” Hooray!