Whoa, a whole month has gone by without me writing a single entry here! Why no updates in such a long time? Well, a bunch of factors, really. I have been lazy. I have been extremely busy in the office. I have been spending more time with little Justin. Here's one of the main reasons though: My main computer, a PowerBook G4/500, has been never been working right since I had the logic board replaced, the result of coffee I had spilt directly onto the keyboard.

I have had the logic board changed 2 times already and it looks like it'll be changed yet another time. With the first 2 replacement logic boards the problem was a relatively minor one — a push of certain keys would have the effect of 3 or 4 other keys being depressed. With the 3rd logic board, the problem is quite serious — the machine would totally freeze/lock-up anywhere from 4 to 20 times a day. The mouse pointer/curser would completely freeze or disappear. These freezes occured in a freshly-installed OS X (10.2.4), stock OS 9 (9.2.2), in Single-User command-line mode (booted with Command-S keys held down), booted from an OS 9 install CD and a Disk Warrior boot CD, and in many different applications (i.e. Eudora, Disk First Aid, Terminal, Internet Explorer). Another important point is that I had never experienced these sort of solid lock-ups since I started using OS X, almost a year ago. Of course, all of this pointed to a hardware, rather than software, problem. On a recent visit to an Apple authorized repair center (one visit out of over half a dozen in the past 2 months or so), the technician suggested the problem was my hard disk. Fed up with the constant freezes and visits back to the repair center, I immediately bought a new hard disk and had it installed. For 2 days, on Saturday and Sunday, the PowerBook worked without any freezes. On the following Monday, however, the freezes came back! I actually took over half an hour of video showing my PowerBook continuously freezing (freeze, power off, start up, disk check, freeze, power off, start up, disk check...) in an effort to convince the Apple repair center that the logic board was likely the problem. So now my PowerBook has been at the repair center for a week of thorough testing and I've been told that the logic board will likely be replaced again (for the 3rd time!) and that I'd probably be able to get the PowerBook back in another week or so, on around June 2nd. So I have spent a tremendous amount of time in the past month troubleshooting and continuously backing up my data. I'll be using my Windows 2000 PCs at home and work for another week.