24 January 2010

Tab Parade in the Clouds

My laptop broke, sometime in December. I think I'd done some grocery shopping at Costco, and the bulk packages filled up the pannier space in which the Mac would ordinarily fit, so I foolishly strapped it in, under the lid, but atop the bags--I got most of the way home before it tumbled out onto the street. The dents looked pretty ugly, but when I got home, I was still able to push all the peripherals into their chosen slots. Nonetheless, it froze up when I popped the lid (it had already had some troubles under a previous owner, including body damage, so "popping the lid" means removing the rubber band that straps it shut in transit). However, curiously enough, the next day, it returned to normal. I immediately took the opportunity to back up to Time Machine, not expecting to duplicate the start-up success, but it kept on trucking for another few weeks. Then, one day at work, it had a "kernel panic". I only know those words because a client happened to be in the shop at the time and recognized the message flashing on the frozen screen. Ever since then, it makes the noises (the orchestral "dunnnn") of starting up, and the fan whirs to beat the band, but no screen ever appears.

It's been a couple weeks since I tried now... maybe today? Nope.

I've been waiting for a basic MacBook to show up among the refurbished itemes on the Apple website, but they're few and far between, so weeks have passed now, wherein I've been stealing time on Deb's computer at home, and laying out patterns on Scott's computer at work, while I dream of one day "getting a good deal".

On Deb's Firefox browser, I opened a separate window for the tabs I tend to accumulate in browsing; but I haven't been doing a very thorough job of reading and deleting those tabs--even the tabs I've read and may want to keep, I've been hesitant to log bookmarks for, since I'm not using my own computer. The other day, I inadvertently clicked the red button to remove the window, instead of the yellow button to stow it in the dock, and a message popped up, saying "you are about to delete 61 tabs". I canceled.
Okay, all that stuff's gonna have to just sit in the library for now. There's no way I'm going to read through all the materials on 61 tabs anytime soon. So, I'll use this post as a bookmarks folder, that I can dip back into, if and when I ever end up replacing my old laptop. I'll eliminate some of the weak links, putting this together, and in the meantime, maybe someone else will find something interesting among the tabs below:


After that, there were about a dozen more tabs related to booking houses in Sea Ranch for a weekend wedding party coming up this summer.

No comments: