Brief update to my ongoing PowerBook saga: it turns out Apple’s repair technicians really did need information from me; the woman who told me their request was an error, was herself in error. It only took five days, four phone calls to AppleCare and two trips to the Apple Store to figure this out. :|

Anyway, apparently the information they needed from me was, “Uh, what did you want us to fix again? Your computer’s working fine!” Yeah, it seems my dead laptop magically resurrected itself en route to the repair center, and is now booting up without any difficulty (whereas before, neither I nor the Skeet Ulrich lookalike at the Genius Bar could get it to start up at all). So I guess the “POP!” sound must not have been the motherboard? Or the fried circuits somehow re-aligned themselves and started working again? Or a temporal anomaly in the Devron System has created a collision between time and anti-time, causing time to run backwards and thus fixing my computer? (Sorry, I just watched the Star Trek: TNG series finale on TiVo…)

Anyway, I have a question for our resident techno-geeks. According to the latest person I spoke with at the repair dispatch center, the most recent notation in my file states, “Unit powers on fine and loop AMT.” He didn’t know what “loop AMT” means, and neither do I, so I’m just wondering if anyone here does?

Reuters has an article about the aforeblogged Xoxohth lawsuit, and its implications for Internet anonymity. Eugene Volokh, of Volokh Conspiracy fame, is quoted:

“They can’t hide behind anonymity while they are saying these scurrilous and menacing things,” said Eugene Volokh, a professor of law at the University of California, Los Angeles.

He said the site was not liable under federal protections that are more lenient on Web sites than TV and newspapers. Prosecuting the manager could also be difficult because he did not write the posts, Volokh added. But the anonymous posters look liable and their careers could be jeopardized, he said.

“This ought to be a warning to be people that if you say things that are not just rude but arguably libelous and potentially threatening and perhaps actionable on those grounds then their identity might be unmasked,” he said.

Finding and identifying the posters — including one called “The Ayatollah of Rock-n-Rollah” — could be tough but is not impossible. The process involves subpoenas issued to Internet Service Providers for records, and then more subpoenas to companies, institutions or people identified on those records.

“I’ve said in my blog the most vile posters on that board are two subpoenas away from being outed,” said Leiter. “This led to much amusement by the anonymous posters on the board.

“But they are about to find out that this is how it works.”

So, this is brilliant. I just got an e-mail from Apple stating, “We need additional information about your POWERBOOK G4 (17-INCH DOUBLE-LAYER SD) before we can repair it. Please call 800-APL-CARE and refer to Repair ID [number redacted].” (Except it didn’t say “number redacted,” it had my actual ID there.) So, I dutifully called the number, and after some frustration navigating the automated menu (which doesn’t have an option like “press 5 if you got an e-mail telling you to call us”), finally reached a person at AppleCare headquarters. I gave her my Repair ID, wherepon she checked my record, saw the same message I’d gotten, and then put me on hold while she checked to see just exactly what “information” the repair technicians needed. She came back with words to the effect of: “Okay, they left a message saying they need more information, but they didn’t give any information about what information they need.” So she wrote a note to the repair techs asking for details, and said I should call back later today or on Monday morning (!).

It’s times like these I wish I had a MySpace or LiveJournal blog, so I could end this post with one of those emoticon-producing tags like “Current mood: Exasperated.”

UPDATE: Apparently the e-mail was sent out in error; they never actually needed more information. My computer is still undergoing various tests.

And away goes the PowerBook… back to repair. :(

UPDATE: The Work Authorization form says “PROPOSED RESOLUTION: diagnose/replace.” Hmm. Replace? I wonder what that means. (The “ISSUE” is described as “Repeat repair - Unit made a popping sound and now is a dead unit wont turn on at all. Plastic above optical drive is sagging.”)

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.

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?

It is widely expected that most, if not all, of the main features of Leopard (OS X 10.5) are to be revealed at the WWDC keynote that just got underway. Best coverage is at MacRumors Live.

UPDATE: Apple has a list of features here.

I promised earlier that I would explain why I was at the Apple Store yesterday afternoon and evening. Well, my PowerBook is having some issues, both hardware- and software-related. (Details after the jump.) I’ve been putting up with them for a while, largely because I didn’t want to be computerless for any period of time during my final semester of law school. But I don’t need a computer to study for the bar (indeed, its absence will probably induce me to study more and blog less), so I finally decided to bite the bullet and take the computer in.

Just like the other time I brought in my 17-inch PowerBook for repair, its absence leaves me using Becky’s old iBook — her extremely slow old iBook — as my primary computer, albeit with a FireWire clone of my PowerBook’s hard drive as the startup disk. (The resulting squishing of 51 Dock icons, which fit just fine on my 17-incher, onto a 12-inch screen, is rather amusing.) Everything takes an excruciatingly long time… so I think it’s fair to say I’ll be doing less with the computer for the next little while, out of sheer frustration.

Anyway, like I said, there are more details on my latest computer saga after the jump, if anyone’s interested.

(more…)

As long as I’m at the Apple Store (for reasons I’ll elucidate in a new post later), I might as well point out Apple’s new TV ads for the iPhone, which comes out on June 29. I think this is the coolest one:

Will any of y’all be buying an iPhone? I won’t, because a) I can’t afford it, b) I’m under contract with Sprint until next May, and c) as cool as it looks, I’m skeptical of whether the touchscreen with no tactile feedback would work for me. Besides, I figure it’s better to wait until the initial kinks have been worked out. I’m sure iPhone ‘08 or iPhone ‘09 will be even cooler. :)

You know how I know Knoxville is better than South Bend? It has an Apple Store! :)

(Please note, this is what was supposed to appear in the blank "Woohoo" post below. Heh.)

For those who haven’t been following Matt Drudge’s orgasm of paranoia over Google’s new “Street View” feature, you can get caught up on all the fun with this BoingBoing post: Google Maps is spying on my cat!

Personally, I see this as yet another effort (along with the publication date of Harry Potter 7) to prevent me from passing the bar. Why would I want to review Torts and Contracts when I can spend my time virtually touring the streets of New York, looking at such landmarks as David Letterman’s theater, Rupert Gee’s Hello Deli, my old workplace, my old apartment and nearby Fort Tryon Park, the pet store 33rd & Bird, Central Park, Ground Zero and the World Trade Center PATH Station, Rockefeller Center, and of course my favorite place in New York, St. Patrick’s Cathedral? Etc., etc.

P.S. Take a virtual drive across the Brooklyn Bridge! Just go here and then click the NW arrow repeatedly.

You can do the same thing with the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, the George Washington Bridge, and various others.

Brendan’s recent positive experience with Best Buy notwithstanding, the store doesn’t have a reputation for being that good to consumers. A few months back, it came out that in at least some locations, Best Buy employees were using an internal website with prices different than those shown on Best Buy’s Internet site to scam customers into paying more for items than what they were originally advertised at. Suffice it to say, people were not pleased by this, and the state of Connecticut (or are you guys a commonwealth or something?) is taking Best Buy to court over this incredibly shady practice. Three cheers for the nutmeggers!

Heh.

Well, it may be the subject of a legal dispute, but at least the iGasm isn’t banned in Cyprus!

09 f9 11 02 9d 74 e3 5b d8 41 56 c5 63 56 88 bd
09 f9 11 02 9d 74 e3 5b d8 41 56 c5 63 56 88 be
09 f9 11 02 9d 74 e3 5b d8 41 56 c5 63 56 88 bf
[redacted]
09 f9 11 02 9d 74 e3 5b d8 41 56 c5 63 56 88 c1
09 f9 11 02 9d 74 e3 5b d8 41 56 c5 63 56 88 c2
09 f9 11 02 9d 74 e3 5b d8 41 56 c5 63 56 88 c3

Shirt form available here.

For those of you not familiar with these semingly random 128 bit numbers, see Brendan’s previous post here.

I’ve made clear before that I absolutely despise the law-school message board Xoxohth (a.k.a. AutoAdmit). As I wrote then, “the cretins who inhabit that message board are a bunch of dishonest, pretentious, snobby, racist a**holes who delight in anonymous character assassination and tearing down their fellow human beings.” I stand by those words. But even so, to be perfectly honest, I take no joy in this:

[Law firm] Edwards Angell Palmer & Dodge rescinded its job offer to Anthony Ciolli, the 3L at Penn Law who resigned as “Chief Education Director” of AutoAdmit last month. He resigned in the wake of a WaPo exposé on how the site in part served as a platform for attacks and defamatory remarks about female law students, among others. …

Charles DeWitt (pictured, left), managing partner at Edwards Angell’s Boston office, where Ciolli was slated to be a litigation associate, told the Law Blog: “He worked for us last summer. He’s not going to work for us in the fall.”

Ciolli took time from working on final exams to talk to the Law Blog. “Three years of legal education has been wasted because of an unmoderated message board,” he said, adding, “The timing is absolutely horrible.” The 23-year-old…added that “I don’t know what I’m going to do next.”

To be honest, I feel bad for the kid. As much as I hate the product he helped create, I wouldn’t wish his fate on any fellow law student. That doesn’t necessarily mean I think he doesn’t deserve what happened to him; there is some factual dispute over how much control he had over the content of the message board, but certainly, through his role in creating a disgusting site widely known for character assassination, he set himself up for this fall. As a commenter on Above the Law put it:

Dude had it coming. He decided to get involved with a free speech experiment in which he helped run an unmoderated message board. People posted insidious lies in the forum he hosted, and those lies have caused harm to the career prospects of innocent people. Now his career has been affected, too, because of what he allowed to happen to the careers of others. In what world is this not justice?

True… and yet, and yet. However much of a scumbag he might be, I can’t bring myself to be happy about what’s happened to him. It sucks, it just really sucks, to be 23 years old and have your career s***canned because you made a mistake, even a big one. I honestly feel for him. And this is precisely why I find the behavior of the a**holes on AutoAdmit (and, cough cough, ND Nation at times, among other places on the wild, wild ‘Net) so baffling: they don’t think twice about tearing down their fellow human beings over nothing, and they frequently take immense joy in their peers’ failures and foibles… while I, on the other hand, don’t even feel the slightest twinge of schadenfreude over something like this (even where the punishment arguably fits the crime quite nicely). And I don’t consider myself an unusually noble or magnanimous person. I’d like to think I’m pretty normal in terms of my tendency not to celebrate other people’s misfortunes. But maybe I’m wrong about that? I dunno. Perhaps I’m naive, but I think most people are good at heart, and at worst are thoughtless rather than spiteful. Once faced with the humanity of another person, I think most people feel empathy. The problem with the Internet, sometimes, is that you don’t have to face the other person’s humanity, you can just treat them like a series of pixels or a string of binary code. That leads to dehumanization and a lack of empathy. And I think we need to strive to fight that.

In this particular case, given all the circumstances, I don’t blame others if they do feel a bit of joy over Mr. Ciolli’s pain. I can understand the viewpoint of the commenter who wrote, “I hope this is only the first for the assholes at AutoAdmit.com. They are truly the worst this world has to offer, and I hope all of them are ruined.” I agree that they are, if their online behavior is any indication of their true character, “truly the worst this world has to offer,” but as for hoping that they’re “ruined”? No, I don’t hope that. I hope they see the error of their ways and reform themselves. I hope they make amends with the people they’ve hurt. But I don’t hope they’re “ruined,” and I’m not glad Ciolli is jobless. It was probably the right decision, and he probably deserves it, but I’m not glad about it. All I can think about his situation is, “man, that sucks for him.” Again, I don’t mean to make myself sound noble or anything, that’s just honestly how I feel. And that’s why it truly confuses me that some other people, especially when surrounded by the cloak of Internet anonymity, can become so strikingly mean and nasty and hurtful, for no reason. Do they not understand these are real people they’re hurting, just as I understand that Anthony Ciolli, whatever his flaws, is a real person? I don’t get it. I really don’t.