I called Apple support, and they are sending me a new battery. I’ve still ordered the new one, so now I will have 2 batteries. This is not a bad thing; I’ve wanted to have two batteries for a while now. I plan to keep this laptop around for as long a time as I can, and in a couple years it will probably be devilishly difficult to procure a new battery for it.
Apple support was very helpful. :)
Well, I went ahead and bought that battery, because my current one is dying horribly. I’m still going to call Apple support. In fact, I’ll do that right now. Updates to come soon.
I did some research, and it seems the battery issues with my MacBook Pro are a bit anomalous. I only get about 2.5 hours from a full charge, and it has a disconcerting habit of suddenly powering down when it says I have about a half hour left. When this happens, I -know- the battery is dead because any attempt to restart it lasts for only a few seconds before it powers down again.
Anyways, I only have 60 charge cycles on this battery, so it should not be acting up like this. I’m going to call Apple support on Wednesday, and see if I can negotiate myself a replacement battery. I have the three-year AppleCare plan, so it shouldn’t be a problem.
If it’s not covered under my warranty, I’ll be rather annoyed. I may buy another battery, or I may not. I’m undecided on that front. When I go to work after I graduate, I am going to be given my own computer, and from the descriptions of the particular project I will be working on, that computer will be a laptop. If I am getting my own new laptop, what need have I to buy a new battery for my current one? It will, presumably, be only used for my own recreational purposes, and will spend most of its time on my desk. I won’t be sitting in the library on campus killing time like I do now. It could end up being $130 to waste.
On the other hand, I really want a working battery.
On that note, my car needs a new battery too. Perhaps I will fix that soon.
I bought a pair of new glasses yesterday. Woo! They were expensive, though: $259.95. But I needed to have a second pair. And I like the style, although I have been told that they make me look even more like Harry Potter.
Seriously, the difference is striking. I was opened to a level of detail that I had forgotten existed. It was a bit overwhelming at first; I had so much more visual processing than I was accustomed to to do.
I finally finished my puzzle solver. It’s pretty awesome. It takes a category-feature matching puzzle and solves it using deductive logic rather than by brute force.
I actually finished the code yesterday, as well as most of the report. However, I spent several hours today cleaning it up. At this point, it works, it’s simple, and the algorithm is encoded in two functions. Once of them process an exclusion rule, and the other merges two groups. The code looks amazingly simple.
Lord knows it took me long enough. Getting this to work has been quite an affair. But now it is finished and documented. It’s 232 lines, though; the solution was surprisingly small.
A package arrived for me via FedEx from my employer-to-be when I graduate. I was expecting something like it. It turned out to be a detailed description of the various employee benefits that the employer offers. There were two things: A folder full of explanations and forms, and a 500 page book describing the retirement program mutual funds.
I must admit to being a bit floored by the book.
Well, I’ve finally finished the grammar for my C compiler. What has resulted has been a very stripped down version of C, but one that I can actually implement. There are no floats and no arrays (although array accessing works, sort of). A lot of the syntax has gone bonkers. Anything that is successfully parsed by this compiler should be successfully parsed by a real C compiler, but not the other way around.
Arrays are a bit of a kludge. Arrays are now accessed purely as pointer dereferencing. That means the behavior for multi-dimensional arrays is a little different. In a normal C compiler, “x[y][z]” is translated as “*(x + y*sizeof(x)+z)”. Mine is going to handle it as “*(*(x+y)+z)”, making multidimensional arrays into a tree of pointers.
Our internet is back, which is nice. I like having my high-speed net access. Of course, however, I’m not able to use it much at present; I’ve been house-sitting for a while now, and will be again later this weekend. Two weekends spent at the in-laws’ house.
But I took the time to set up the wifi for the landlords, as well as to get the port forwarding I needed set up. Paradox (one of my computers) is back in business. SSH tunneling FTW.