Tuesday, April 17, 2012

Once More, With Feeling (and a Support Group)

My employer is offering to subsidize membership in Weight Watchers, and to support meetings at the office if enough employees join (the "enough employees" is a Weight Watchers requirement, not my company's.)

Given my weight has been stable the past few years at my long term high water mark, I'll try it.

A dietitian told me years ago, "Drew, you know the rules.  You just need to follow them!"    Maybe WW and their metrics will help that.

Sunday, April 15, 2012

Service After The Sale

When you dive into life in the Apple ecosystem, life can be expensive.  On the other hand, sometimes it's worth it.

As implicitly shown in our cat blog, my home office includes a Mac Pro.  I speced it out in 2008 to run multiple virtual machines, but mostly it and its monitors keep the cats warm while I just surf the web.   

However, last Caturday I had a real project I wanted to attack, so I hopped out of bed at the crack of dawn and powered it up to do actual programming and ... got nothing except a blinking power light announcing a memory error.

Oh, bother.

I did a bit of poking about, and then made an appointment at the local Apple store.  I hauled it in.  They agreed it was probably memory or associated components, and admitted the patient.    They held it for a week, through two rounds of parts ordering.   I muddled along with my work portable in the meantime.    

I picked the machine up yesterday, with two components replaced for $150.  I brought it home, and booted it up.   Once.  Second boot, the symptom is back.  Oh, bother redux.

It was back to the Apple store today. They were able to get it resuscitated, and I'm typing on it now.  

This where I should say "What a pain" for them not fixing it the first time, but I know perfectly well the machine worked when I got it home, if however briefly.    Furthermore, their second pass replaced more components for no charge, and generally supported a machine which is not close to being the current model. 

My take: "Will use again".

p.s. The real pain is the <expletive> machine itself, which is built like a tank and thus weighs  40+ lbs.  It's worse than hauling a catzilla to the vet.