Thursday, April 3, 2008
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Various followups in e-mail. MacBook Pro (MBP, November 2006) consistently fails to restart properly from Windows XP (Boot Camp). The screen goes black. Sometimes the Mac chime is heard at this point—sometimes not. Caps Lock light is stuck in off (unlit) and fails to toggle, laptop is fully charged, and AC adapter light glows green and steady. The pill-shaped light on the screen release latch lights only for a few seconds during startup during the Mac chime and then it turns off and stays unlit at all other times. No other lights on the computer to indicate onness, but putting an ear directly above the keyboard reveals that something inside (a fan or motor) is still on. Mousepad, mouse button, and keyboard provide no response. Pressing the power key once makes the computer emit a high-pitched whine that winds down and dies within 1 second. At this point, the computer appears to be completely off. Pressing the power button once makes the computer start up, seemingly normally. Problem happens even while installing Win XP in Boot Camp at the first and second restarts (reboots). In OS X, Tech Tools Pro indicated no hardware problems. Shutting down (shutdown) from Win XP works as expected. Lunch was chicken boob leftovers. Dinner at home with Patrick: pasta shells, sausage, broccoli, herbed slab, EVOO and balsamic vinegar. Spent a long time trying to get Apple Mail configured to received mail from my multiple accounts. iChatted with Tina, experimented with iChat effects, photo sharing, video sharing. Screen sharing did not work—it spun and spun but never completed. She was able to successfully configure Apple Mail according to the instructions I gave her to retrieve mail from her 2 e-mail accounts. When attempting to download VLC 0.8.6f in Firefox 2.0.0.13 for OS 10.5.2, I received the following error message: "[filename] could not be saved, because an unknown error occurred. Try saving to a different location. (OK)" Changing the Safari downloads folder did not work. Changing the Firefox downloads folder did not work. Deleting ~/Library/Preferences/ com.apple.internetconfig.plist [one space added to avoid layout problems] did not work. Still unresolved. Wait—deleting the plist file did fix it! Hooray! Downloaded photos from the camera. Late meal: chunky soup.