I was glad to hear today that Greene is now complete. Though sorry to see that he has a virus. Good thing my virus blocker stopped it, and good thing I found Greene’s email in my junk email box and was able to see his wonderful email about now being complete.

Finally I take my G4 powerbook to the apple store here in San Francisco to get fixed, hopefully for free with applecare. Last August the powerbooks’ screen started flickering in and out. If I moved the screen a small bit I could get it to stop. It was acting like there was a loose connection somewhere… As this started I had to head off to London for a tour of the EU. Upon arrival at the hotel in London I came upon two very sad realizations. One, that I have seemed to have left my cell phone in the taxi, and two, only the top half of the screen will show me anything. This is very sad indeed. With no time in the UK to take care of it I’m off to Reading and Leeds festivals. Then we went to Berlin, where luckily we had a bit more than a weeks time for me to work on it.

First I tried calling applecare, I found numbers in the EU, but was having some translation issues. Then I tried calling applecare US with skype, but found myself on hold for hours on end. Searching around on the web to find local applecare approved repair does not look to promising. And during working on all this I’m using the bands computer to make the calls, and continue on advancing shows and whatnot, booting via target disk mode, so everything is as I expect and I don’t mess with the bands computer too much.

Eventually I decide that I’m just going to have to get a new computer and work on fixing this one latter. Keyboards are a bit different in the EU, a bit too different than I liked, so I had my friends at Powermax in Portland Oregon ship me one of the first macbookpro’s. On with a long tour with the intel as the not pro macbook (amateur?) sat on the bus. Using the intel I lost the gumption to take care of getting the other one fixed, as I didn’t have an immediate need for it and the applecare was still good for a couple of years. Finally with time to spare I make an appointment with the genius bar at the apple store here in San Francisco…

After about a 15 minute wait I show my G4 to a genius, the problem was pretty obvious, and he tells me it needs to be sent in and here sign this and here’s your tracking number and off I go. This was on Friday.

Wednesday the computer shows up at my house, and has been fixed, covered by applecare! Boots up and works just fine. There wasn’t much info in the box on what they did, seems they replaced the screen (though not the outer shell as all my stickers were still there). They also took out half of my memory, a 512k chip, which was in a plastic bag and sent back with the computer. When I bought the computer from Powermax I had them beef it up to 1Gb of RAM, and they basically put in a 512 chip. When apple repaired the screen they took this chip out, and the documentation seemed to suggest that this “3rd party part” was either causing the issue or was not passing their diagnostic test in general. It’s really easy to install memory on the powerbook G4, four screws, off comes a plate, and there you are. So I put the memory back in, and all seems to be fine. I’ll have to do some other tests and talk to Powermax about it, but at the time I’m guessing it’s something they have to do legally for some reason, since they didn’t put it in (though I purchased it that way).

Now I just need to figure out what to do with it, as now I have 3 computers. The original G3 powerbook which is serving this blog, the G4 powerbook that I just got fixed, and the intel macbookpro that I now do all my work on. I could see using the two live if I feel like carrying two around, one for work work, and the other at FOH to play music and record and/or analyze the show, or maybe as an effect box…..