MacBook Pro | that damn redhead

Waiting for my new keyboard to come — a chronicle.

January 18, 2009: Day 1 without my MacBook Pro.

Sent out tweet around 5:00 p.m.: “I haven’t tweeted all day. I’m OK, but feeling so empty and useless without my MacBook Pro. This is going to be a long week.”

Online activity sparse: Checked email, sent a couple DMs via Twitter. Read a couple blogs and commented. Couldn’t get into Facebook because it was down for maintenance or something.

People have been asking me what I’m doing this day or that day. Realized I can’t answer those questions because my schedule is in my iCal, in my laptop, which I cannot access. Yes, it does sync with my iPod, but I haven’t synced my iPod in a few days and have added appointments, etc. since then. Must do my best to remember everything. Think I’m going to follow Laurie’s lead and go back to using an actual planner that you write in. Have been thinking about it lately, the only hindrance being my god-awful handwriting that is illegible even to me.

Otherwise, have been mapping out in my head how much of my current projects I can do with this bare-bones PC and whatever tools/data I’ve got online. Think I should attempt to map these things down on paper now, trying my best to write legibly.

10:13 p.m. I’m sitting here, staring at this monitor, and I feel like I have a LOT to do … I just can’t remember what any of it was. This is not good.

January 19, 2009: Day 2

Tweeted around 10:30 a.m.: I’m tweeting, I’m tweeting … how long is this going to last? I feel like less of a person without my MBP.

Last night I tossed around the idea of getting a new MacBook Pro. I definitely can’t afford one, but I’m in the process of officially starting my own business (attempting to, anyway), and thinking about including a new MBP in my startup costs if/when I apply for a loan. I can justify the need. Even if this had never happened, I needed to buy an external hard drive because my internal one only has about 15 GB left on it. My MBP is about 3 or 4 years old, it’s tired, and its programs/OS need upgrading. Hmm… may be wishful thinking, but I can dream, right?

There is a Tweetup tonight in Novi at B-Dubs. My presence is expected and I would like to go see everybody, but I’m also kind of in the dumps and should probably stay home and get as much work/research done as I can tonight. I don’t know.

January 20: Day 3

Went to the Tweetup in Novi last night. It was huge. Had a lot of fun (maybe too much?), met a lot of cool people, hung out with friends. Brain is kinda fuzzy today. Was going to go to Shauna’s & Kasey’s inauguration party tonight but fuzzy brain + not getting the stuff done I wanted to last night = no go.

Scott Monty & me at the Novi Tweetup.

It’s technically the third business day from when I ordered my keyboard, but it did not come. It was a good mail day, though: I received my $50 rebate card from Verizon, my $15 from the Nielson people for taking that looooooong online survey, and my coupon for a free Whopper I earned for “sacrificing” 10 Facebook friends … before Facebook sacrificed the app. (They were people I barely talked to/knew, anyway.)

I need to bury my face in some research now. Well, maybe I’ll eat first. Maybe a Whopper.

January 24: Day 4

I am so non-productive that I can’t even think of what it was I was supposed to do in the first place. My brain feels like Jell-O when I stare at my TweetDeck. Tried to accomplish what would be a relatively simple errand for anybody else but me, ended up visiting two VG’s & an out-of-order ATM with no dice. Found a dead bird in my yard, can’t wait to take care of that on garbage night. Attempted to do a lot of research and read until I thought words were going to spill out my ears. I think my brain is broken. Nothing is going right for me today.

January 22: Day 5

Keyboard finally came. Woo-hoo! Spent an hour or so installing it and putting my computer back together. First thing I did when I turned it on was sync my iPod. And now, I am so tired of dealing with this whole issue that I’m grumpy and don’t even feel like being online. Hmph! Signing off.

January 22: Day 6

I realized that after all that, the left side of the keyboard isn’t secure and flat like it should be, and my caps lock doesn’t work. I’m going to have to take this thing apart all over again and try to adjust it. WILL THIS EVER END?!

(That was hard to type without caps lock, btw.)

Image 1 by makelessnoise, image 2 by Daniel Eizans, image 3 by hyperscholar.

In the middle of a(nother) Zoe-induced geek crisis. Back later.

Beware of cat.

I was preparing for a very productive weekend of catching up on my RSS feeds, writing a business plan, remodeling a website from the inside out, preparing a presentation, and putting together a video.

That isn’t happening now.

Thanks to my lovely, adorable, attention-demanding cat Zoe, all of the above and then some has been put on hold until I receive my replacement MacBook Pro keyboard anywhere between 3 to 6 business days.

Last summer she was the main proponent in a traumatic orange soda incident that I documented on my now-defunct other damn blog , but in a nutshell I graduated to a new level of geekdom when I decided to save a lot of money and fix it myself by taking apart the laptop, cleaning it up inside, and installing a new keyboard. I decided to document the process because I’m that big of a geek. Little did I think that I would actually have to perform the exact same surgery again.

Fast forward to today, and I was just about to start on Task #1, when Zoe was being her usual self and not leaving me alone. She jumped on the table and was sitting on my notebook, then decided to jump down when she realized I wasn’t going to give her the attention she deserved was demanding. In doing so, the force of her pushing off the notebook to jump caused the notebook to collide with a glass of Coke, which in turn fell right on my keyboard in some kind of bizarre Rube Goldberg-like incident that lasted half a second.

Thankfully (?), this time I knew exactly what to do and took the proper procedures to reenact the prior surgery, thinking that after I extracted the keyboard from the rest of the laptop, could just pop the keys off, clean everything up underneath and (God forbid) inside the computer if it reached there, pop the keys back on, and put the MacBook Pro back together like nothing ever happened.

Or so I thought.

After taking everything apart and discovering that the CPU had not been touched (*phew*), I proceeded with the, well, procedure, and then spent I-don’t-know-how-many-hours later trying to pop the keys back on. I learned the hard way that it’s not as easy as “just pop back on,” and could not get them to stay all the way on … some not at all. Finally, I accepted defeat and realized I’d have to buy yet another new keyboard and do this aaaaaaalllllllll over again.

So basically, the majority of the stuff I wanted to accomplish this weekend and this week are on hold, mainly because the important data I need just happen(s) to be trapped on the hard drive of my naked, dismembered MacBook Pro.

I do have a PC from which I’m typing now and will be checking email periodically (even tweeting a bit), but I won’t be able to do very much except whatever I can do via cloud computing … which actually might be more than I once anticipated now that I think of it.

Still, my point is that I’m bidding adieu to the internets for what may be a week à la Celine Dion … meaning it’s not really goodbye but “I’ll be less around” … until I decide to go on another farewell tour or something.