REARVIEW (5)

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OLD BLINKY

I love my computer, but it is nearly as high maintenance as my feline companion. I bought the floor model of the Apple MacBook from the Bestbuy near my place in late 2006. It's a great machine, but in order to be able to use it for the transcription job I signed up for when I first moved to LA, I had to partition the hard drive - running the Apple environment from one portion and the Windows environment from the other. This has created a myriad of issues within both operating systems, the most recent of which is that the beta version of the program that I used to partition the hard drive is no longer available and now the only way I can make any changes is to purchase a whole new operating system from Apple. Ya know, I like Apple products quit a bit, but they really have racket going with upgrades and service. Just saying. During one of the colder days in LA, I came home to find the keyboard of my open laptop covered in cat pee. Because I had left the computer on, it was a bit warm, and my cat being the slut for heat that he is, decided he would take a nap across keyboard and, as always happens wherever he naps, he left a few puddles of urine behind. It was fun explaining THAT to the service guy at BestBuy. Sigh.

I'm still having issues and still frustrated with the fact that I'm unable to utilize the majority of features on my machine due to the memory problems created by Boot Camp and iDisk (don't even get me started), but have plans to load all my files onto an external hard drive and then clear the hard drive and reload the factory defaults. That is, as soon as I can afford an decent external hard drive.

In addition to the software issues, there's the CD super drive: after the service folks at Bestbuy changed the "shell" of the keyboard (cat pee does not seem to be compatible with OS X), the operating disk got jammed in the "super" drive and won't come out.

This is not one of the hurdles I was prepared to jump when I was imagining my life in LA. But I'm encountering more unexpected hurdles every day - most of them centered around money - the lack there of, and maintenance and the ever increasing demand for it.


Many delays with Blogging and emailing can be attributed to not having reliable computer access during my off work hours.

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