Blog archive for October, 2008

We’ve been pretty busy getting our ducks in a row for the last few weeks. As a brief respite from all this startup stuff, I’ll tell you a little story about how a few years ago, my laptop was fixed by nature’s little mechanics.

James and I have had rough luck with our MacBook Pros to date, which leads me to wonder whether or not the standard of Apple’s manufacturing has slipped a good number of notches in these past few years. We love our Macs, but James had to send his in within the 14-day RMA period due to intermittent lines on the screen. And then of course, there was the beer incident, in which a cold brew was knocked into this RMA-ed machine, and much hilarity ensued.

I guess it was only a matter of time before something happened to mine – and sure enough, three months in, here I am working on James’ trusty 1.42GHz iBook. Coding and designing on 1024×768 is a humbling experience, but I am terribly fond of Tiger and how robust it is. Admittedly, Leopard has been disappointing on the stability front, and on average, application startup time just doesn’t seem as snappy as you’d expect on a 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo machine. 

My MacBook Pro is in for service due to a faulty keyboard and trackpad – an issue that debuted two weeks ago and became progressively worse by the day. The machine would wake from sleep without a working keyboard and trackpad! After some time it would come back, but it wasn’t until I found a post on the Apple support forums that I learned a quick fix for the issue.

Older MacBook Pros needed a keyboard firmware patch, but the newer ones seem to require a more holistic approach: shiatsu. Firm pressure applied to the area between the keyboard and trackpad, presumably to release some tension, the chi starts flowing, and the machine allows me to type again.

Of course, after a week of massaging my laptop, I start to think that this is an untenable situation. Especially when I’m not getting any backrubs in return. 

I digress. The above has nothing to do with nano-technology, but it helps put the story in perspective.

I may work my machine hard, but these three months are a blip in comparision to the service my other laptop, the original G4 Titanium Powerbook, has given me: over 7 years. Try to imagine a PC laptop that old which is of much use nowadays. In 2001, the Powerbook was way ahead of its time, with its sleek profile, Airport (few people knew what Wi-Fi was back then) and FireWire (I would use this to connect my Generation 1 10 Gig iPod to it later that year).

It would’ve been closer to three months than seven years had this first machine not been impervious to my clumsiness. That was how long it took before I knocked a half a bottle of V energy drink onto the keyboard, necessitating a quick power-off and a good amount of time flipped upside-down (both the laptop and myself). Fortunately the plastic membrane under the keyboard shielded the innards from the spill, and the Powerbook was up and running again in a couple of hours.

I joke that since then, the machine has run at twice the speed; but in reality, the problems began after most of the liquid had dried up.

V, like most energy drinks, is loaded with sugar. Sweet, sticky, syrupy sugar. And sure enough the next day, my keys began to stick to the bottom. You would depress a key and wait for a few seconds before it popped back up again. Great if you were a thoughtful writer, or if you had no arms and could only type with a pencil in your mouth. Or if you were both. For me, it rendered the computer pretty much unusable for the foreseeable future.

I tried many times to clean the area under the keys – believe me, I’m now very intimate with the delicate constructs of the original Powerbook keyboard. The sugar however had solidified into tiny gluey globules, gunking up the little hinges that facilitate the keys’ press action.  

It wasn’t until a fateful afternoon that summer that a solution presented itself to me. It was a hot afternoon in Subang Jaya, and I’d decided to crack open the Powerbook to do some work. The good thing about 36-degree (C) days was that the sugar melted a bit, making the keys more usable.

I left the machine on a table and popped into the kitchen to get a glass of water. Upon my return some minutes later, lo and behold: ants. Little black ants. Thousands upon thousands of ants in a trail, leading up to the Powerbook, and sure enough – into the keyboard, where they swarmed about under the keys in an alarmingly frantic fashion.

All I could do was stare.

Shooing them away didn’t work. Blowing on the keyboard didn’t deter them from their task. I opted against reaching for a can of Mortein as I couldn’t bear the thought of the oil, poison and dead bodies in my Powerbook, not to mention a thousand ant-souls perished by my hand. So I did the only thing I could – I left the ants to it and went outside for the afternoon.

When I got back, there was not a single ant to be seen. They’d sensed the sugar from what must have been over twenty feet away, come in, cleaned up, and left. With surgical precision, no less.

And as for my Powerbook? The keyboard worked like it was brand new again. And it’s been perfect ever since.

That is, until I spilled half a glass of Riesling into it earlier this year. Now that finally paralysed half of the keys – but by then, many generations of Powerbook had come and gone; I found a replacement on Trademe for $25. 

And that’s the story of how an army of little ants fixed my laptop. I wonder if there’s a business model in this?

Epilogue. The G4 Powerbook is still going strong, and while it’s had plenty of travel and adventures involving bumps, falls and cats, it has never failed me. At 400MHz however, it’s reached the end of its OS X upgrade lifecycle (which is probably a blessing, considering how flaky Leopard can be). But its low power consumption means a 4.5 hour battery life with a 74 Watt-hour aftermarket NewerTech battery.