I picked up my brand spankin’ new, shiney, happy iBook this evening! :)
Damn this thing is nice… :)
A huge thanks to John, the Apple genius, and the rest of the genius bar staff at the Short Pump Apple store for making this happen…
YAY!
I am wildly, passionately, amazingly, wonderfully, happilly, incredibly, totally, and completely in love with one Kristina Lynn Caudle… :)
I mean, honestly, how could I not be… ;)
Just had to share… Happy Valentines Day to all!
As any of you who read my blog on even a semi-regular basis know, I’ve been having quite a few issues with my laptop over the past year or so… I’ve been through at least two hard drive and two logic boards (the latter of those being due to Apple support installing the WRONG logic board the first time) since buying my iBook, and I was kinda starting to worry that I’d purchased a dud…
For most of these issues I took my laptop in to the Apple Store (about an hour away in Richmond), and I was always very pleased with their service and their general tendancy to go above and beyond my expectations to get my issue resolved…
This is in STARK contrast to my recent experience with Apple’s phone support. I decided to call them first with my last round of issues to save a trip to Richmond. After thuroughly confusing the poor guy with the main issue (”You did an erase and reinstall? And it’s doing what? It just shouldn’t be doing that!”) I proceeded to explain that I would also like to have the correct logic board installed, since they put the WRONG one in last time… This really confused him and he had to put me on hold for about 20 minutes (half with music, half with an annoying voice saying “Please hold” every 10 seconds) while he talked to his supervisor… Long story short, I finally got to ship it back to them, but, when it was returned to me, they had only addressed the logic board issue…
I must say, it’s very disheartening to get your “repaired” computer back and have it not boot at all…
So, I decided to suck it up and go to Richmond. Kris and I went together on Saturday (despite the snow). We got there around 1:00 and the place was packed. I set up the earliest appointment I could with the Genius Bar (for 5:00) and proceeded to have lunch and do a lot of shopping with Kris…
So, 5:00 rolls around and I get to talk with a very nice Genius, who looks at my system, sees what it’s doing and goes “wow, that’s messed up”… :) So, he runs some diagnostics and checks my previous repair history (I explained to him all the past issues and the logic board mix up… to which he commented “I’ve done a lot of repairs for Apple… I’ve NEVER put in the wrong logic board [shakes head]“) while Kirs and I do a bit more shopping to kill some time…
So, we get back and he tells me the diagnostics didn’t turn up anything obvious, but it was probably a hard drive issue. He then said something I total wasn’t expecting… He siad, “I’ll go ahead and check it in as a repair and try a new drive… but, I’m also going to talk to my general manager about some options other than repair…”
As Kris and I were leaving she said, “Did he just say what I think he said?”… “Yeah, I think so… but, I don’t want to get my hopes up…”
Anyway, fast forward a couple days to last night… The Apple Genius said he’d get back to me by Monday at the latest… So, about 7:00 I get a call from him… And…
THEY’RE GOING TO REPLACE MY LAPTOP WITH THE CURRENT 14″ IBOOK!!!!!
Oh my goodness, I’m so excited… :) I do have to drive to Richmond again to pick it up, but I think that’s more than worth it…
I have no doubt if I had called support again, I would have just gotten another run around, a replacement hard drive, and more issues down the road… but, being able to go in and really show someone who knows what they’re doing the issues I’m having, and being able to really explain what’s going on… it’s just a heck of a lot more satisfying to me, and I think results in much better service….
ESPECIALLY WHEN THEY DECIDED TO GIVE ME A NEW FRICKIN’ LAPTOP!!!!
And that’s why I love the Apple Store… :)
Just finished up a couple more updates to the site… First off, I think I fixed the weird issue between the theme and IE… Basically IE wasn’t smart enough to realize that if there wasn’t a background defined for a sub object, it should use the background of it’s parent object… And I have no idea if I’m using the right terminology for that or not, but whatever…
I also put up a new photo album this morning… I was originally going to try and write my own plugin based on my old photo album, but then I happened up on this one this morning and I think it’ll work just fine. It doesn’t do the same kind of nifty JavaScript image preload and image navigation thingy that my old one did, but I think it’ll work just fine… Maybe if I’m feeling ambitious I’ll modify this one to include that… I don’t think it would be very difficult…
Anyway, try those out if you want and let me know if there are any issue… I’m sure I’ll be changing some other things around too in the not to distant future….
So… I’m trying a little something new with the site… color… well, a little bit of it at least… :)
The theme is still evolving, but I thought it might be good to get it up and get a little feedback (assuming anyone actually ever looks at this thing anymore considering how infrequently I update these days)… So, let me know what you think… if you want…
At the moment, I know that there is apparently an issue with the IE and the little blue bubbles on the side bar… I’ll have to dig through the CSS to try and figure out what’s going on there… or, preferably, everyone can just switch to Firefox… That would make my life easier at least…
I also have a little work to do to adapt my photo album scripts to the new theme… I think I may try to figure out how plugins work in WordPress and adapt it to work that way… it would certainly make it easier next time I redesign…
Anyway, in other news my laptop is on the blink again… When last we left this saga my iBook was in the shop getting it’s logic board and hard drive replaced… Well, I got it back a few days after that and everything seemed fine… altho a little slower… Finally I checked out the system info and, oops!, someone put in the wrong logic board… instead of my usual 1.2GHz processor, I now had a 1.0GHz…
Well, I put off doing anything about that until last week, when everything crapped out and the best I could get was an occassional kernel panic…
Sooo, after an very painful half hour on the phone with an Apple tech (well, 6 minutes with the tech, 24 on hold while he talked to his manager), I finally convinced them to take it back, give me the right logic board, and (I thought at least) resolve the other issue which I think is a failed hard drive… well, I got it back today and it looks like they just replaced the logic board and shipped it back to me without even trying to boot it up… I just tried wiping it out completely (again) and reinstalling and, after hanging halfway through the intitial setup, it’s now just hangs on bootup…
I think this time I’m going to suck it up and make the hour drive to the Richmond Apple Store… It’s a little more effort, but I feel a little better when I can actually show someone (who, in past experience at least, SEEMS rather knowledgable) what’s going on…
Sigh……….
Anyway, other than that, things are going pretty well… Things with the love of my life Kristina keep getting better and better… We should have an interesting week or two coming up… We’re going to see Nada Surf in concert this week, then next week we have an excellent night out at The Shabeen planned… We also have at least one little trip planned in the upcoming months, and probably a few more once Kris hears from a few more grad schools…
Other than that, things are pretty quiet… yeah…
I really need to be better about this… :)
It’s been a heck of a long time since I posted anything… Part of that is due to the hoidays (birthdays, more birthdays, Christmas, New Years, Martin Luthur King Jr. Day)… but, mostly, I’m just lazy… :)
An well, I promise a more in depth catch-up post soon… mainly this is just a test to see if my recent update to WordPress was successful…