Author: Chris Barrus

Adventures in Snow Leopard, elderly batteries, and AppleCare

Soon after upgrading my MacBook Pro (three year old 2.2 model) to Snow Leopard, I noticed the Battery menu item was giving me the “Check Battery” warning. Not a tremendous deal for me as 95%+ of the time I’m working on the grid and not on battery, but it was puzzling enough to get me to pursue it. Apparently, Snow Leopard has much improved battery monitoring but a lot of people out there are interpreting this as “Snow Leopard broke my battery” rather than “Leopard never told me anything about my battery.”

So I followed Apple’s instructions… reset the SMC a couple times and ran a full-discharge/recharge of the battery – to no effect at all. It’s a three-year old laptop and admittedly the battery wasn’t really holding a charge anyway, but I still have a couple months of extended AppleCare warranty left. Made an appointment with the AppleStore at The Grove and after a short wait, the Genius ran a detailed diagnostic on the battery from some sort of iPod-based app. The battery was indeed “bad” and not merely “depleted.” An important difference that determines whether your battery is dysfunctional (and covered under warranty) or just worn out from regular wear-and-tear that’s not covered.

The resolution? Apple replaced the battery free and now I’m happily computing again with 100% battery power for the < 5% of the time when I actually need it. Conclusions:

  1. Always get AppleCare on any Apple laptop. Between this new battery and a hard drive replacement a year and a half ago the outlay for AppleCare has paid for itself. To repeat again: always get AppleCare on a laptop.
  2. There must be some sort of fallacy/madness-of-crowds definition for the phenomenon of when providing more information causes less reasoning. Strangest recommendation was the advice to downgrade back to 10.5 strikes me as getting annoyed at a dashboard warning and putting a piece of tape over it.

Ted Kennedy

In the summer of 1986 my brother got married in Philiadelphia so my sister, my mom, and I all flew out to attend. We had a spare day so we rented a car and drove down to Washington D.C. Surprisingly, for all the travelling we do, none of us had ever been there so it worked out. I love old dorky-level American history (and still do) and a day-long mix of that with my traditional level of cynicism towards the government sounded terrific. With an early enough start I figured that I could just keep hitting museums until closing time or until I got tired of looking at things.

By the afternoon I needed a break and since the visitor lines were short I took a break in the Capitol building and hung out in the Senate viewing gallery to see what was going on. It was time to leave after a half-hour or so of bureaucracy watching and as I was walking through the crowd in the main rotunda I heard That Voice. Totally unmistakable. Everyone in the universe knows the Kennedy Voice. I turned around and there was Ted Kennedy – chatting with a couple of aides.

Easily the most charismatic guy I’ve ever seen. Startlingly so. It’s difficult to think of someone outside of movie stars and pop culture types who’ve got that kind of magnetism but whatever the “it” is that makes someone own a room Ted Kennedy certainly had it. Even in a crowd of aides, random lobbyists, and anonymous tourists. I can only imagine how well it worked for JFK.

Gawker has the best assesment of his career. Probably the most OTM sentence is:

The man’s many, well-documented flaws aside, he was on the right side of history, most of the time, and he did more to actually make America a better place than 90% of the careerists and charlatans who pass through the United States Senate.