Today has been a pretty blah Monday. I say "blah" because work was so-so and other stuff pretty much sucked. It probably didn't help that I took Friday off and gave myself an extended weekend.
CapitolMac called to tell me that my replacement keyboard for my Titanium beast had finally arrived from Apple. So, at lunch, I went over there and had them install a new (and hopefully fixed) part. I also got a quick peek at the new iBook. Pretty spiffy. It was smaller and glossier than I expected. It almost looked like a cube and a TiBook had a baby. As expected, the screen seemed a little small..but it was running 1024x768, so the screen real estate is as large as any 17" monitor..only squished to fit in a 12.1" screen. Still pretty neat, though.
Anyways, so I made my way to the service area and handed one of the service guys my TiBook. He replaced the keyboard and booted it up to make sure everything worked. Pretty standard stuff. But when he got the system up and running and started typing things to test, the top row of keys (q-p) weren't responding at all. So, he turned it off and replaced the keyboard with yet another unit from another TiBook in the service area. When he booted it up this time, the strange behavior continued..only a little different. The bottom row of keys (z-m) came out on screen as "121221212211" when he ran his finger across them. Very strange. So then he started questioning what software I had loaded and if I had any system extensions that might be causing the strange behavior. Amazing. So then the guy started saying that the problem was definitely a faulty logic board. So, he told me that I'm going to have to let them send my PowerBook into Apple for repair....and that could take weeks!! So, before I send it off, I decided that I need to do two things:
1.) Do a few of my own tests to make sure that the logic board really IS bad..and this guy really knows what he's talking about
2.) If the board really is bad, then I'll need to backup my data before I send it off. Jeez, I hope it doesn't come to this..
Without going into too much detail, I'm fairly distrusting of the guy's troubleshooting tactics and diagnosis, so I feel like I need to see all of this happening with my own eyes. It's for the same reasons why I don't take my truck to some shop to get the oil changed; How do I know for sure if the filter will get put on all of the way tight? Or how do I know that the billy-bob at the shop didn't forget to add that last quart of oil? Yes, folks, I have a strong belief in the idea that "If you want something done right, you gotta do it yourself. And THAT is my thought of the day.
Posted by Jeff at May 14, 2001 08:02 PMHey, Jeff. I know this has nothing to do with your update, but have you seen the movie Driven? I think you'd enjoy it.
Posted by: Jack at May 15, 2001 12:10 AMJeff,
What was wrong with your keyboard in the first place? I don't recall hearing about that.
What did you do this weekend?
Posted by: Brian :) at May 15, 2001 09:53 AMWhoops! For those of you who didn't know the original problem with my keyboard, here it is: It's posessed. Randomly, it would start typing characters all by itself. But, it would always type the same characters (9ol./), so I figured that it was probably a short in the keyboard ribbon cable (inside the computer).
My weekend was great. Olivia and I went to Bridgewater on Sunday and took Mom and Dad out to lunch at Outback. It was really good to see them again. :)
Posted by: Jeff at May 15, 2001 11:35 AM