vaderpi's random rants

Yesterday was a very sad day for me. I killed my Powerbook. I whole story will follow, but in short, it was my fault. I should have been more careful, and now I will not be doing any Mac OS X development for the foreseeable future.

Laurie and I have been remodeling two of the rooms in our house. Part of this remodeling is replacing the windows. On Monday, we picked up our first window from Home Depot. On Wednesday night at around 7pm, we started to install the window.

The first step when installing a replacement window is to remove the old one, which in our case includes removing the storm window from the exterior of the house. About 2 hours later, we had everything out. However, it was at that time that we noticed that the existing window jamb (the area that the new window sits inside) needed to be repaired before it could accommodate the new window.

Up to this point, I had my Powerbook in the room with me. The window installation instructions that I found with Google’s assistance were displayed in Firefox for easy reference. However, when the time came to start using a saw, I removed the Powerbook from the room to prevent it getting covered and or damaged by saw dust.

For further easy reference, I placed the Powerbook on Laurie’s desk in front of her monitor. On my way out of the room I was very careful to shut the door. We have 3 cats and 2 dogs that represent 5 wonderful ways that our stuff usually gets ruined. We keep the door shut when we are not in the bedroom to help prevent against this. I will talk more about the Powerbook later, for now, lets get back to the window.

The existing window jamb was repaired and ready for the new window at about 10pm. The only trouble is that about 10pm a storm front moved through Roanoke giving Laurie and I a wonderful view of the storm through the gaping hole in our house. Because of all the caulking that is involved when installing a window, I did not want to get started on the actual installation until the rain had stopped. This gave Laurie and I an hour break while we waited out the storm.

We hung out in the bedroom while we waited out the storm. We spent most of our time bitching about how tired we were going to be, and checking the radar to see when the storm was going to pass by. Oh yeah, and I kept running back to the window opening to see if the rain had stopped. And when I checked at about midnight, it did.

So we left the bedroom and went back to the room with the window. We installed the sill angle, caulked the inside of the outside stop (that direction made no sense whatsoever the first that I read it), and then we placed the header on the top of the window caulked the top of the header. Next, we placed the window in the opening, and installed the mounting screws, slid the header up until it was against the top of the window opening.

At this point, I went out on the roof of our enclosed porch to caulk the outside of the window. Just after I got started, Laurie said that she heard a loud crash that she needed to investigate. Upon her return, she informed me that what remained of the diet soda that she was drinking during our break had been knocked over onto my open Powerbook. She promptly cleaned up all the liquid as best as she could tell from under all the keys. She performed this step so well that she broke the delete/backspace key. She then checked that all of the keys worked.

Hearing that she took care of the liquid, I finished the caulking and got ready for bed. Before I fell asleep I shut the laptop down, note that it was still working at this point, and placed it out of the path of any visible liquids.

I did not take the laptop to work the next day as I usually do. With a broken backspace key it was going to be difficult to use, and I decided to wait to resume the practice until I had ordered a replacement from Ebay.

Last night, when I opened the laptop, I notice a thick layer of condensate on the screen. I promptly wiped it off, but was a little concerned about the possible presence of more liquid where I could not see it. I shook this fear from my mind and pressed the power button only to be presented with a blank screen.

At this point, I started to panic. I flipped the laptop over to check its charge. The battery was indicating that it was still at half capacity. At this point, I should have disassembled the laptop to make sure that no moisture was hiding anywhere. This is pretty easy to say now. If only I could make ever decision with the benefit of hindsight. Instead, I plugged in the power adapter.

After about 10 seconds, I started to smell the all too familiar smell of burning silicon, so I ripped the adapter plug out of the laptop. But it was too late. The damage had been done. At this point, I did take the laptop apart. Too bad it felt like I was performing a post-mortem and not a diagnostic. When I took off the bottom of the laptop I saw an array of melted electrical components.

So at about 7:15pm last night. I wrapped up the power cord on my laptop’s power supply for the last time. Rest in peace, little friend. It was definitely not the fastest laptop I ever had, but it was the lightest, a feature that I really did not appreciate in laptops until I used this one.

<frown />

This entry was posted on Friday, June 10th, 2005 at 7:54 am and is filed under . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.