Disassembling
December 13th, 2007My friend Doug is visiting from New Zealand. Doug is a video editor
and, among other things, spent a few months in the last year living on
the Great Barrier Island editing a reality show for BBC called
Castaway. But that’s another story.
Last night he came over and we got an epic Cuban feast as take-out
from Pambiche and my other friend Chris Higgins took Doug’s 12-inch
PowerBook apart to replace the optical drive. I don’t mean, like, took
a couple of screws out to add RAM. I mean COMPLETELY TOOK IT APART.
Doug, reasonably, teetered on the edge of freaking out. There were
three pages of print outs just to describe the screws that would need
to come off (and in what order). When Chris was done, all there was
was a frame. At one point, Chris disconnected a very small (but very
essential) power connector, but, sadly, the pins came with it. Mr.
Pencil soldered it back on, but when the machine was (miraculously!)
re-assembled, the power button didn’t exactly so much work except if
you poked at the solder point with pliers. Still, I can’t believe it
worked at all after that disintegration. It’s sort of like watching a
kid take apart a pocket watch and actually manage to get it back
together.
Hell, I learned a lot about the bits and oddities of the inside of a
Power/MacBook. And they’re going to go address that bad solder today,
so everything is going to be just fine!
December 13th, 2007 at 2:56 pm
Yeah, I just got back from lunch with Doug and saw documentation of your story on his camera’s tiny LCD screen. Even at postage-stamp size, it was filled with tension.
Also, “and my other friend Chris Higgins” makes it sounds like you have two friends in this world: Doug and Chris. Since I am listed under “Friends and Awesome” at right, by process of elimination, I am awesome. But wait, if I reach back into the style manual in my mind, I’ll realize that would only be true if you’d written “and my other friend, Chris Higgins”, which you didn’t, perhaps because you are more aware of such rules than I was when I began this paragraph. Never mind. Chicago style rules!
December 13th, 2007 at 2:57 pm
It turns out that when you <strong> a comma, no one can really tell. Lesson learned.
December 13th, 2007 at 4:31 pm
Funny, that’s not the first time Chicago style came up in my life today.
December 14th, 2007 at 11:22 am
Hoping to hear from Macforce any minute now about whether (or to what extent) I’m screwed!
I definitely learned a lot. The tech guy I talked to was all like, “Wait, you installed an optical drive in a twelve-inch PowerBook?” I feel that even with the (slightly critical) screwup, I have earned some kind of nerd cred now!
;Chris