Emi's Journal

Or so I’ve been told.

Need I say more?

So here I am sitting in the batting cages, watching practice. SWEET seats. Got great wifi here too! And I can hear the music going over the speakers, at least for now. 1.5 hours left until game time!

Super Regionals are back! I didn’t get tickets for all the games…. Bought two today though. One for tomorrow’s game, and if there’s a third, I’ll be there Tuesday too. Payed more than I wanted too, but hey. Such is life scalping tickets…. Considering people were offering $100 for tickets I considered getting them for $30 as a bit of a steal.
Well, today me and a bunch of other people spent our time out by the corner of outfield, behind some low temp bleachers. It wasn’t too bad, all things considered…..

Well, the game went 8 innings scoreless. Needless to say it was almost getting tedious watching it. But the beavs took hold of the game in the 9th, finally getting a run in. Michigan did their best and put up an excellent fight, but they were no match for our defending champs.

Tomorrow is game 2, then if necessary we’ll have a Tuesday game. Which is unusual, but since we got rained out yesterday that’s how it ended up.

I wrote this on Thursday last week… Thought I’d go ahead and post it here too:

So as most of you probably remember, a little over a year ago now I started having trouble with my computer. Seemingly after the AC adapter overheated and started smoking…. Making me get a new AC adapter.
I continued to have problems for quite some time, everything from AC not charging battery, the battery not fully charging, and later, the computer shutting down randomly, and not always booting again.
Finally getting fed up, I brought it to the Mac Store. After insisting for sure it wasn’t a bad AC adapter (having tested that theory already), they told me to buy a new battery. I did so, but it only resolved one issue… The battery not fully charging (only going to about 45% at that point).
I brought it back in, and was finally told my theory may be correct after all: bad DC-in board. Roughly $100, and a week, was all I needed to get it fixed. Saying I didn’t have a week to be computer-less at the time, I brought it back home with me, intending to bring it in later.
Two weeks ago I brought it in to the Mac Store. It no longer worked on AC adapter, shutting down whenever it was plugged in. It no longer charged the battery…. I recognized it was rendered unusable, and sent it in. Payed the $45 diagnostic fee, and that was that.
Two days later I got a call… “We can’t duplicate any of your issues, send us your AC adapter, we want to test it.” I told them it’s not my AC adapter. I told them it was the DC-in board. They told me the symptoms were classic DC-in, but they couldn’t find anything wrong with the DC-in. Oh, great…. Next logical cause, logic board. Cascading failure. Send it to Apple, $420.
After telling them there was no way I would spend $420 to fix it, I sent them my AC adapter (although I also told them it wasn’t the AC adapter, they didn’t listen).
Over a week after I first sent it in (1 week, 2 days), I called them back. I hadn’t heard from them yet, so I called them. They said it was on its way home, it was the AC adapter. I told them they were wrong, they said if they had to re-diagnose it would be free. Content that I would replace my AC adapter (under warranty) and prove them wrong, I went with it.
I picked up my computer and brought it home. Plugging it in, my suspicions were confirmed. The battery was not charging. The display failed. The battery was DIScharging while plugged in. It would have to go back to the Mac Store…. But if the display was failing it looked more and more like logic board every second… My compy was doomed.
I put in a request for a loan. Time to buy a MacBook. Hopefully my iBook would last long enough to migrate…. One can only hope.

Today I brought my iBook to work with me. Since I was getting paid, I could afford the MacBook (turns out they don’t have the new ones in at the bookstore, so I couldn’t get it today, but I had the money anyway…). I was ready to migrate over, granted my iBook lasts that long…
This morning for a few minutes it was recognizing AC…. Seizing the opportunity, I started it on a back-up at work. It seemed to go OK, for a while…
After class I went to check in on it, it had failed. My computer was off. The battery dead. It had stopped recognizing the battery and had drained out during the back-up… I was out of luck, to back it up we’d have to pull the hard drive.
Fortunately it was really slow at work. Mark and I (mostly Mark) worked on getting into my iBook…. When Mike came in, he seemed the natural person to help me out (our resident take-things-apart-and-find-out-why-its-not-working-then-put-it-back-together person).
We finally got down to the logic board… The next step, remove the DC-in. I of course was curious about this… The symptoms clearly pointing to a bad DC-in. Mike looked at it, said it looked like it had some blackening… Said he’d look at it when we got it out.
We took it out, he looked at it, and informed that it had a short. It had been arcing.
I was right. Bad DC-in. Take that, Mac Store!
Then he told me… He could fix it. Soldered it, handed it back to me, said it was the best he could do with the cheap soldering iron he was using…. Good enough for me.
We stuck the DC-in back in, and I figured we could turn on the computer to test it…. Having not been recognizing AC, it had recently refused to boot without the battery.
It booted.
We re-assembled my computer (another amazing feat…. iBooks are a pain to dismantle!), and I set it up to back up… Hopefully successfully.
At this point in time it has been backed up and running smoothly… Battery charging, booting properly, no display failures or anything!

What are your favorite and least favorite words? Any reasons why?

I like the word “food”… It makes me happy!