Christie doesn’t necessarily “get” Coheed and Cambria – they’re proggy and sci-fi and way too long-winded, but they get out of the way of themselves every once and a while and deliver a really awe-inspiring blast of rock.
About the only problem with this track is that they might be getting a tiny bit predictable, and I mean that in the nicest way possible. They are predictably awesome. Like any songwriters, there are some intervals and changes that they go to more than others, but I wouldn’t complain at all if there were 100 bands like this in four years. I mean, how many Godsmack bands are there right now? Yish.
I was doing nothing – minding my own business – and the display on my Mac suddenly spazzed out – colors went washed out, odd lines appeared along the bottom, and it was almost 100% unusable. (I could sort of read what was happening along the top, but that was about it.) I suppose for a lot of Mac owners, they’d immediately call AppleCare or bring it into the shop, but I’m capable of the first few things that they’ll try: adjusting brightness, rebooting, rebooting with the cmd-alt-P or whatever it is to empty the video cache… but nothing worked. (Attaching a monitor to the side worked fine – so the problem was somewhere between what the Mac thought it was showing me and what was actually being displayed on the main display.)
I’d used my last laptop as a desktop replacement, attaching a monitor and getting some work done, when I’d dropped it. I eventually sent it to Dell, who reconnected something that had gotten loose. But I didn’t want to do that with my Mac – I’ve been taking it to work every day for months, and it’s too nice to keep closed all the time. But this was also the reason I’d signed up for AppleCare – something weird had happened, I didn’t know what was going on, and I decided to take it in.
A quick search online brought some worrisome news (but online searches for nebulous things frequently bring worrisome news) – front-line Apple techs won’t ship Macs in for repair if they have any reason to believe that there’s nothing actually defective with the machine. Like, for instance, you dropped it.
But they found no reason to blame me when they checked out my Mac at the store. They saw some warping of the case (my bag doesn’t have any solid support for the MacBook – I figured the metal would stay straight, but it’s one of those things where a slight pressure, applied every time you walk, over a year, adds up), but they sent it in to get the display replaced.
It took them 8 business days, slightly outside the 4-7 they promised (and past the “early end of that” that they’d hinted), but I was pretty happy to pick it up. (They removed the RAM I picked up earlier this year at OWC – apparently it “tested bad” but I don’t see how it could have been part of the problem.)
That gave me two weeks of XP life, but it’s really okay. In that time, my last assignment ran out, I got a new assignment, and I’ve had to learn a ton to get up to speed with a new team and new project. It wasn’t my intention to abandon the blog here, but I guess you’re all used to it by now. (Again I highly recommend getting, learning, and using an RSS reader – it breaks my heart that people come to this site in the morning to see if I’ve posted anything, when posts are coming about twice a month right now. Save time and energy – let Google Reader tell you when I update.)
