The iBook is sick

Well, I feel a bit lost right now. In a truly mysterious collapse, my trusty iBook has politely declined to operate any more. Strange sequence of events... I closed the thing last night to shut iTunes up, and when I opened it up this morning, it refused to revive. It hasn't done a truly stable boot since, and Apple thinks the logic board may be fried or on its way to crispiness.

This distresses me... it's been an enormously reliable little beast and I hate to think it'll need surgery. While I have AppleCare on the thing, I've also done extensive surgery on it, probably voiding AppleCare (never mind it's worked perfectly well for a very long time after these updates).

So, I'm down to desktop machines again. Maybe I'll drag the iMac upstairs and put it on the table next to the bed again, the way it started out. I like the iBook's feel a little better, though. I don't find using a mouse with an Apple nearly as nice as using the trackpad. Maybe it's time for me to hunt around for a used newer iBook. I don't particular care to spend that money just now, though. Trying to pay some things off and not run up any more bills if I can help it...

Hopefully the thing is just being a pain in the ass, and will revive itself. It's had only one minor illness in its life so far, and it more or less got over it itself. I'm not optimistic it'll do it this time, but...

The remainder of the trip back was smooth and nice. The Volkswagen got truly amazing mileage drafting behind trucks on the flat sections of I-95, somewhere around 32mpg. It was interesting to watch the realtime readout on the gas mileage.

When I got home, the cats had plenty of food, but were out of water. Where I had left the water in the kitchen sink dripping, when the catsitter came to refill the water dispenser, she turned the faucet completely off. I think the cats had just run out of water when I got home, but they were happy to see more in the tank. Whether they were actually happy to see me is debatable.

On the way home, I talked to Linda. I sort of doubt that will occur again... she displayed some really negative aspects of herself that I'd just as soon not encounter. Seems that she thought I hadn't tried hard enough to contact her during Lotusphere, and when I told her, OK, fine, we can talk now, she got rather huffy and told me that she "wasn't there at my convenience" and declined to talk.

The engineer in me sees the obvious problem here: she wants to talk to me, but only on her terms. Worse, she seems to be the sort who doesn't want to get to a solution -- I was perfectly happy to apologize and move on -- but rather wanted to detail all my failings and force me to acknowledge them. After several attempts to say, "look, what do you want me to do?" I gave up, and told her that it probably won't be a good thing for us to talk again. I've already wasted enough time with women who'd rather keep score than be happy, so... bye, Linda. No harm, no foul.

Back to work tomorrow. Let's see how far I get before I get bogged down in day-to-day crap.