laptop

You won't be getting a Friday Links tomorrow. See, last Thursday I was home sick and my laptop died. The screen went black and it was done. It will chime when I start it but won't boot beyond that.

The case needed replacing already. It had taken a good smack or two and the back liked to open up when I'd close it. A couple of days before I had finally ordered what I thought was a replacement case. Then the computer died and I was hoping that just moving it to a new body would do the trick.

What happened was that when I tried to order the case online I couldn't check out. You probably know I work on a military base. This means my address isn't short.

My name
Base name
Department name
Building number, room number
Street address
City, State, Zip Code

You find creative ways to make all that fit in the address forms of websites. Apple was unusually restrictive. I couldn't make it fit. So I called Apple and ordered that way. The person on that end also had a restricted form. But she assured me that the name of the base and department were unnecessary. She assured me that FedEx would still get it here.

FedEx is like six different but cooperating shipping companies. My package, had it borne the name of the base or the department, would have gone to one of these FedExes. It would have gone to the FedEx that brings me lots of other stuff. Not having that information meant they assumed it was a home delivery and gave it to a different FedEx. This FedEx doesn't like security gates. This FedEx has, in the past, hit that security gate three times and returned my package to the sender rather than call me. This FedEx also doesn't work on Mondays.

So they try to deliver once and give up. I see what's going on and call them and explain the situation. They say call back because it's Monday and that particular FedEx division is closed. I call back Tuesday. They say they can add the company name and move it to a FedEx that does it's job but that will slow things by a week or so. Or they can hold the package and I can come pick it up. I opt for that second one. Then the whole office packs up and we go to check out where we think we'll move to.

When I return I check the tracking info. The package has been delivered and was signed for by the person who had been driving during our road trip. Noooooo, that's a lie.

Being severely chastised got them to put up with base security. Instead of bringing the package to the person whose name and address is on it they claim they took it to the guy at the main desk. Since he wasn't there they took it to people across the hall from me and had them sign for it but put the name of the guy at our main desk instead of the name of the person who signed.

So I get the package, open it up, and it's the wrong thing.

Instead of a replacement case it's a clear plastic shell that goes around a case.

I go looking at cases again. I should have known better. I find replacement cases at a non-Apple source and see that to replace all five parts of the case will run just short of $1,000.

So I go out to SmallDog.com and look at what they have as far as laptops. They have a 17" refurbished MacBook Pro laptop for $1,600. I can either move my hard drive over and call it good OR I can get creative. See, I use my laptop at work a lot. I bought it so I could telecommute from Florida fourteen months ago. It handled most of the files for one of our books. But the network ports at work are now restricted to one MAC Address/Ethernet ID. Not only that, but for reasons related to a whole different long story, we can't get new Macs on the network. So a new laptop wouldn't work at work. What I need is to be able to keep the Ethernet card and thus my MAC Address. The Ethernet card on the laptop is built into the motherboard. So I need to keep the motherboard.

You probably see what I mean by "creative". For $1,600 I'm buying a full laptop which will be stripped for parts. I'll move the insides of my computer to the new case. I'll keep the new DVD burner since mine has been acting flakey. I could have bought all that and the price would have been close to what this whole new laptop cost. Plus I have extra RAM and a second hard drive.

I get home after ordering the new laptop and have a message waiting for me from SmallDog. They tried to confirm my shipping address with my credit card company and couldn't. Well, of course not! Why in the world would my credit card company have my work address? In fact, that's pretty much what the person at the credit card company said when I called them. But they made a note in the comments section of my account. I called SmallDog back and told them to check again.

Hopefully, it comes in next week and I can get online and next Friday I can have a respectable set of links for you.

update: Dingus at the credit card company changed my billing address to my shipping address rather than adding a shipping address. In theory it's fixed now.

update 2: The credit card company saw that my address had been changed twice in three days and a large order to the strange address and denied the order. In theory, it's fixed now.