It may or may not be completely fixed, though. Stay tuned.

UPDATE, 12:09 AM: The computer just spontaneously shut down, for no apparent reason, and now it won’t start back up again.

I’d been using it for a few hours, reinstalling all my third-party applications and such (because they did a clean install of the OS), and I was just drag-and-dropping some files onto an application on my Dock when — POP! — the screen went black. And I do mean “pop”: it made an audible sound, like maybe it had short-circuited or something. The battery was nowhere near dead, so that wasn’t it — and it gives you warnings before a low-battery shutdown anyway. In this case, there was no warning. (Well, no official warning. I did notice, as I was walking across the room with it a few minutes before the unexplained shutdown, that the screen flickered off for a split second. In retrospect, that was probably a warning sign.) Anyway, like I said, now it won’t start back up again. I tried unplugging everything and removing the battery, giving it a minute, and then hooking it back up, but… nope.

So, it looks like I’ll be returning my PowerBook to the Apple Store less than 24 hours after getting it back. And now I’m officially getting annoyed. They “repair” it, and within a few hours, it commits suicide? Not cool.

Oh, and they didn’t even fix one of the original problems I complained about: the loose plastic casing above the CD/DVD drive. They replaced more than $300 worth of parts (none of which I had to pay for, thanks to AppleCare), including the CD/DVD drive itself, but they left the loose plastic untouched! Well, they may have done something to it, because it’s not as loose as before, but it’s not secure either — it’s just back to where it was maybe six months ago, which suggests to me that it will sag again, and eventually start obstructing the drive again. Why didn’t they just replace that part? WTF? (This is why I originally said it “may or may not be completely fixed.”)

More urgent, though, is the computer randomly shutting itself off. Seriously, at what point do they throw in the towel and get me a new one?

UPDATE 2: The armchair diagnosis in comments is that the motherboard is toast.

An important state Republican figure, until recently the object of much Respect, has given up his legislative leadership post following revelations involving his Family, an alleged Underworld biggie, and a Conspiracy to commit Threatening, among other related matters. (He vows to retain his Senate seat, but personally I’m doubtful about the odds of That shoe staying on much longer.)

June 13, 2007
Associated Press  

HARTFORD, Conn. — Senate Minority Leader Louis DeLuca resigned as leader of the Senate Republicans Wednesday after coming under fire for asking a trash hauler to threaten a man the senator believed had abused his granddaughter.

DeLuca, 73, pleaded guilty last week to a misdemeanor threat charge.

“After careful consideration, and out of respect for this institution and for my caucus, I have decided to step down from my leadership position,” DeLuca said in a written statement. “I promised from the beginning that I would not allow my mistake that I made interfere with my public office.”

DeLuca represents Woodbury and nine other towns. He plans to continue serving as a senator.

He received a six-month suspended sentence and was ordered to pay a $2,000 fine and donate $1,500 to charity as part of the plea deal.

…State and federal authorities said DeLuca in 2005 sought help from James Galante, a Danbury trash hauler currently awaiting trial on 72 counts of tax fraud, racketeering, threatening and extortion.

DeLuca said he had sought help from the Waterbury Police, but to no avail. Frustrated by the situation, the senator said he discussed it with Galante in a Woodbury diner, where the trash hauler passed DeLuca a note that asked, “Do you want me to have someone pay him a visit?”

Authorities said DeLuca told Galante “yes” and gave Galante the name and address of his granddaughter’s then-boyfriend. She is now married to him.

Waterbury police have contradicted DeLuca’s claims that he asked police three times for help.

The assault never happened. Prosecutors, who recovered the note in a search of Galante’s home, said they stopped the assault. DeLuca has apologized for his actions, calling them “stupid” and said he never meant to cause any physical harm to the man.

DeLuca has also been criticized for offering to help Galante politically. His comments were captured on an FBI surveillance tape…

More after the break.
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I don’t know what Canada’s laws on freedom of speech are, but if this sort of thing can happen, something obviously needs to change.

Hey, wasn’t this a question on Nicole Garnett’s Property exam in 2005?

Who knew that arguably the most heavily (and persistently) postmortemed exam question of our three years at NDLS was so prescient?

Casey writes Pericles’s obituary.

Apparently sometime between 11:00pm Monday night and 8:00am Tuesday morning, someone cleared out all NDLS lockers without locks on them. This was not authorized by anyone at the law school, and so far no one knows who did it. This was not done just to the lockers of graduated 3Ls–this was done to any locker without a lock on it. Actually, it appears that any graduated 3L who had a lock on their locker did not have anything taken. It appears that only those lockers without locks on them were cleared out. So far I know of two 1Ls and one 2L who did not have locks on their lockers and had everything taken from them. If you are a 1L or 2L (or a rising 2L or 3L, if that’s the term you prefer) and you had items in your locker and did not have a lock on it, I strongly suggest that you contact Peter Horvath or Anne Hamilton to 1) double check that your locker was cleaned out, and 2) if it was cleaned out, report what was taken.

This is a big mystery to everyone at NDLS that has so far left many unanswered questions. For example, how did this person get into the law school? The law school is locked after 5:00pm, and only students, faculty, and staff can access it after that time through a detex system. I’ve been told that security is reviewing the detex records for that night, but so far they haven’t reported anything back. Also, most of what was taken were books, which raises two questions: 1) Why would someone want so many law books? The law school administration is checking with local used book stores to make sure they haven’t received a large influx of used law textbooks. But still, these books aren’t that valuable, so I can’t imagine who would go to such an effort to take them all. Plus, two jackets that were hanging on the coat rack near the lockers were untouched. I would assume that if someone were just stealing whatever they could get their hands on, they would have taken those too. 2) How would a person transport all those books? From the three lockers I know were emptied, there had to have been at least 50 pounds of books (one person had almost every book from their 1L and 2L years in their locker). Since I’m sure there are more that were taken, the “thief” would have had to have some way to get them out of the law school probably other than just making multiple trips by hand.

My hypothesis is that someone from the University somehow thought these lockers needed to be cleared out, and therefore did just that. I’m guessing that the missing items won’t end up in a used book store or on eBay, but instead probably went in the trash. Still, being that this is not the policy of the law school (the graduated 3Ls’ lockers don’t get cleaned out until at least July, and the 1L and 2L lockers go untouched) and no one in the law school knows anything about it, it remains quite a mystery.

There was yet another gas leak on ND’s campus today. As I was walking past the Mendoza College of Business on my way from the Law School to the C parking lot, I noticed a fire truck and two NDSP vehicles parked outside of it. As I approached further, I began to smell gas, and one of the NDSP officers was blocking off the area around the building with caution tape. I had noticed on my way into the law school this morning that they had begun to dig up the road behind Mendoza today, so I’m sure they weren’t being too careful and hit the gas line.

Here’s a picture of the NDSP and NDFD vehicles:

And here’s a pic of an NDSP officer blocking off the area around the building:

WARNING: Extreme ranting ahead.

I remember reading this story when it first came out, and I’m surprised I never blogged it before, as I was totally outraged then, and totally outraged now. The story is about one Genarlow Wilson, a black kid from Georgia who went from being a scholar-athlete with a bright future to a “criminal” sentenced to 10 years in prison, without the possibility of parole, for — wait for it — getting a blowjob from a fellow high-school student.

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Margie Kieper looks at the aftermath of Cyclone Gonu in Oman, Iran and the United Arab Emirates. Despite weakening as it approached shore, the storm still did a lot of damage. At least $1 billion in damage, in fact, according to this report. But “Oman is relying on its own resources in cleaning up from the worst natural disaster to hit the country since record-keeping started in 1945. The government has not asked for international help and did not accept the US Navy’s offer of aid.” The death toll is at least 70 — 30 in Oman, 40 in Iran.

CBS has announced the summer rerun schedule that will precede the return of Jericho:

On Friday, July 6 at 9 p.m. ET, CBS will reair the original “Jericho” pilot, in which the residents of a small Kansas town begin to deal with the effects of a nuclear attack. The following week, at 8 p.m., the network will air a clipshow recapping the season’s first 11 episodes, followed by episode 12, “The Day Before,” which began the show’s spring season.

Through the rest of the summer, CBS will use the Friday 9 p.m. time slot to show episodes 13-22. CBS will concentrate on those particular episodes because they represent the second half of the show’s first season, the block of episodes that followed the show’s extended winter hiatus and suffered major viewer attrition against FOX’s “American Idol.”

Obviously, the hope is to get new viewers (and/or viewers who abandoned the show after the hiatus) invested in Jericho before the seven new episodes air. Hopefully, that’ll work. If it doesn’t, though, and the show is re-cancelled after those seven episodes, the “nutty” campaign to resurrect Jericho will have ended up resulting in CBS airing almost twice as many hours of reruns (13) as of new material (7).

Anyway, my advice to viewers who lost interest in the first half-season is: Give it a chance. The show markedly improved in the second half of the season, even as it lost viewership. It went from being decidedly uneven, with an overabundance of cringe-worthy moments, to being actually quite good, packing a genuine emotional punch and really being quite riveting at times. It’s hardly a perfect show, but it’s worth watching, IMHO.

Is Adam Morrison an NBA bust?