So, my G4 PowerBook that I got last August had a bit of a flakey display; starting in October or so, every so often, the LCD display would start to grey over. I took it in to the Genius Bar at the Cambridgeside Galleria and the guy thought it was probably a hardware issue, and that it would have to get shipped to the real support place, and so I should probably back up my hard drive. Thing was, when I got it home, it worked fine for 5 months. Couldn’t make the greying thing happen if I wanted to. Then, when we got back from our little Montreal excursion at the beginning of May, it pretty much stopped working altogether, and I could rarely get it to not do the greying thing. But I just didn’t have my act together to do the backup and send it in.

I should have, though. They turned it around in 3 days; I dropped it off at the Apple Store on Sunday at about 4:45pm, and DHL tried to deliver it at 9:08 am on Wednesday. Not bad!

According to the receipt, they replaced the ASSY, INVERTER, PIEZO, TOKIN, PB15″; and they also did some REPAIR: TIGHTEN/LUBRICATE HINGES.

I went from being not so happy that my fancy expensive computer was not working, to impressed at the speedy repair. Let’s see how it holds up.

People talk about things being stranger than fiction, and in my mind, I imagine a perpetual battle between reality and fiction (which we can imagine as a single universe containing all the individual fictional universes invented by all human beings, everywhere, ever), over who is the weirdest. One day, reality gets the edge. The next day, someone comes up with populating Everquest II with an evil Curt Schilling. Bizarro Curt also supports the ALS association.

(via Universal Hub)

Crime scene.

“Shame of sex? We can change it.”

Marco, why did you not tell me you were going to be in Quentin’s new movie? I feel so out of the loop.

From Wired:

“Hedda Gabler, of all Ibsen’s plays, is about transcendence, the desire to escape this world and the characters’ inability to escape the roles society shapes for them,” he says, looking down at his vegetarian chili, then back up as though it had spoken to him. “It made perfect sense: robots.”

Terri’s got a brand new blog. Switching to WordPress should mean less comment spam. Plus, she gets her own spiffy domain name. And a sassy background.

“Doug invented computer networks, time sharing, graphical user interfaces, and the mouse–all while driving to work one day in 1951. Really.”

With all this wonderful free time I have had the past few days, I’m actually all caught up in my online reading, and am actually looking for new blogs and whatnot to add to my feed reader. So wouldn’t it be nice if the RSS autodiscovery feature in Firefox could be made to work with Net News Wire instead of the well-intentioned-but-basically-useless “live bookmarks” feature? Well, the Feed Your Reader extension is just the trick.

Here it is, just four days before Christmas, and not one holiday post this year!

Let’s start with a re-cap of some of my favorites from last year.

• Auggie Wren’s Christmas Story
• The 10 Least Successful Holiday Specials of All Time
• Beatles Fan Club Christmas Albums
• It’s a Wonderful Life, in 30 seconds, performed by bunnies

And some new ones for this year.

First, this Slate piece gives some historical perspective to this whole anti-Happy-Holidays pro-Merry-Christmas “War on Chrismas” meme. Kids, I gotta say, no lie, I just love what our friends at Fox cooked up this year! Not only is the idea the Christmas is under attack so hilariously and demonstrably false, but, as has been my observation, and as the Slate piece points out, it’s the hardcore fundamentalists who have historically had issues with Christmas. You know, people who have problems with celebrations in general, or back-to-the-bible purists who don’t see any commandment like “Thou Shalt Deck the Halls With Boughs of Holly, for such greens are pleasing to The Lord.” The Slate piece doesn’t delve too deeply into modern fundamentalism, but one incident from about 20 years ago in my own past is one of a fundamentalista substitute school teacher back at my old school district who told a class of kindergartners that there was no Santa Claus, to do her bit to throw some water on the fires of paganism. (I assure you, she won no converts among the parents of the tearful children). So, anyway, really, while the whole spirit of the “War on Christmas” is ugly, the silver lining is that if this is the “front” of the culture war, it means that secularism and paganism have pushed back the front without even fighting a battle.

Second, A Christmas Story, in 30 seconds, performed by bunnies.