Back to School!

Well here I am in Kingston, Ontario, for another year of computer engineering. My mac's been out of commission in one way or another for about a month now, since they couldn't complete the repairs at home and I had to begin the process anew at an Apple dealer here. In that time, Cocoa has again started becoming a distant memory, but I felt I should be posting something of interest here. Starting tomorrow, I'll be updating this blog more regularly with personal posts that will remain in the spirit of mac programming, and of interest to readers (I hope).

Fate?

So I am currently mac-less, as Sunday evening when I opened the lid on my Macbook Pro to awaken it from sleep, the display flickered on once and then stayed off. After a hard shut-down, it would only make scary looking flashes in the corner of the screen when powering on, without even getting to the Mac boot sound. Needless to say, I was scared.

So when I brought it into the local Mac repair shop (No apple stores within hours of my home), I was ecstatic to hear the boot sound and see the login screen, albeit with a flashlight. Turns out resetting the PRAM is a more powerful incantation than I'd ever realized! Pat, the very nice Mac guru of the shop, said they'd have a replacement backlight in lickety-split and hopefully even the new keyboard replacement as well.

The keyboard is an issue I'd rather not get into, suffice it to say that my up and right cursor keys no longer function. This makes coding fairly annoying, but the display issue is actually much more disappointing, as this screen was actually only put in a couple months ago. The original had been making progessively louder buzzing noises after waking from sleep, and it had been replaced with a shiny new display from Apple. I'm actually disappointed by these quality issues in the hardware, since this is my first macintosh, but I've at least been reassured to know that Apple hardware service is relatively prompt and painless.

Needless to say, I have purchased the AppleCare Protection Plan.