Well, I’m not alone in waking up all night every night. Lately, I sleep about two hours at a time. I feel fine, though; so it could be worse.
JournalJanuary 22, 2008 11:27 am
I’m sick of snow. It was pretty when it fell on Saturday. The toddler had a great time sledding with Daddy on Sunday. I was happy to see some melting on Monday. But now it’s Tuesday, and I still see snow (with a fresh layer of freezing rain on top). I mean, it was only one inch of snow, and snow in Central NC always melts after a day unless we really got a blizzard. This dinky stuff … and still here … well, I’m sick of this layer of snow.
The freezing rain this morning doesn’t help how I feel about the ground cover either. When I headed out for work, the first car I saw was an SUV driving very slowly, and it looked very unusual since the SUVs I see on the road don’t drive like that. The brakes felt really funny when I slowed down for the first turn without a stop sign (a grab-slip cycle that I’m hoping was the anti-lock kicking in, except that the yellow warning triangle on my dashboard didn’t turn on … so I started to worry that my brakes weren’t perfect post-accident). The second and third cars I saw were on the shoulders because they had crashed into each other. I took the very next wide turn around to come home. I saw the yellow warning triangle on my dashboard for about 1/3 of the return trip, so the roads must’ve been worse than I was picking up through my wagon’s road feel. NHM: No Heroic Measures for getting to work on time.
Macintosh, Troubleshooting 9:46 am
My laptop keyboard’s been out most of the past month. It was never right after it got doused in water, even though I replaced. There’s a fuzz connector under the T, G, and Y keys that connects the keyboard to the motherboard. Ever since I replaced the keyboard, I’ve occasionally had to press down on those three keys very firmly in order to regain keyboard and trackpad. Well, one day last month that trick stopped working. (Luckily I have an external USB keyboard and mouse so I can keep working.)
The ambient light sensor for the backlit keyboard always works, so there’s power to the keyboard. However, none of the keys work (not even the CAPS LOCK light).
This failure is different, though. I have keyboard right after the laptop boots, but after a while, it goes out (and no amount of pressing on TGY brings it back). For instance, one time I lost keyboard in the middle of typing 11 minutes after a reboot (I was on AC). The next time I was on battery, and it took two hours to go out. That would indicate a heat problem, and fuzz connectors aren’t the most solid connection under the best circumstances. However, I think it’s load-related (keyboard goes away when I see the CPU head up) more than power-related. So still a heat issue, but more about CPU than AC versus battery.
However, I collected a list of suggestions from the Internet on what to try for PowerBook G4 keyboard problems.
- Disk Utility’s Repair Permissions
- Zap RPAM by pressing COMMAND-OPTION-P-R immediately after the startup chime. (This was tough, until I let the laptop cool off for a couple hours so that the internal keyboard worked because the external keyboard isn’t loaded in time.) I also tried the Open Firmware zap by pressing COMMAND-OPTION-O-F immediately after the startup chime and then running these commands:
reset-NVRAM,set-defaults, andreset-allwhich made it reboot normally. - Reset PMU by pressing and holding the power button for 5 seconds when the laptop has no AC and no battery.
- Try safe boot by pressing the SHIFT key after the startup chime.
sudo rm ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.BezelServices.plist /Library/Preferences/com.apple.BezelServices.plist- Reapply last combo update.
Yes, these are predominantly software fixes for what appears to be a hardware problem, but it doesn’t cost anything to try. It does make the new MacBook Air very tempting, but I don’t want onboard Intel graphics.
- Update 1/19/2008: Repair Permissions didn’t fix the keyboard.
- Update 1/21/2008: Neither form of zapping the PRAM fixed it.
- Update 1/27/2008: No luck resetting the PMU. Twice.
- Update 1/29/2008: Safe boot didn’t fix it.
- Update 1/31/2008: Removing BezelServices didn’t change anything keyboard.
- Update 2/12/2008: Combo updater was not the ticket either.
So it looked like a hardware problem, and sure enough, I think this proves it. The fuzz connector between keyboard and motherboard can only be reset so few times, and I went over the limit. This laptop will just have to stay docked …
Guess why I’m awake? I had a tasty Penne Julia italian dinner with a clementine (citrus) for dessert tonight. I like the banana-a-day approach, though; I could see eating that most days.
ChildJanuary 19, 2008 2:29 pm
I hope we’ll be better at sign language the second time around, instead of so intermittent.
Some online ASL resources where you can see the signs: Signing Baby Dictionary, 100 Basic ASL Signs, and the ASL Dictionary.
But I think the real winner is the Born 2 Sign cheat sheet to put on your frig. If we see a reminder all the time …
Ah, I finally figured out why I couldn’t close windows (just tabs) in Safari! I still had the Taboo 0.3 bundle loaded. Remove it (Safari now warns you when you’re quitting with multiple tabs or windows open), and I can close Safari windows again. Whew. It’s pretty annoying when you can’t close Safari windows!
Our Roomba Discovery hasn’t been right for a couple months. First there was the lightning storm, and Kurtis decided that Roomba needed another battery after that (wasn’t charging). So I got a new battery for it. Now it runs in small backward circles for a minute or two, stops for a minute to beep, and then repeats the cycle until we turn it off.
So I thought we should look at Roomba Diagnostics. Other sites also cover the Roomba Diagnostic mode. Most of it comes down to a serious cleaning.
The result of the diagnostics is that the right wheel motors has a problem. Not sure what we’ll do next, but the kitchen is getting crunchy, and the toddler is saying “Robot broken.”
Lisa from Performance just called. She says she just got the pick-it-up call from Mercedes, that they checked out the steering (Performance was worried about getting it just right), checked fluids, checked alignment, and reset the airbag light. She is going to send a driver out to fetch it. She also needs to total up the final bill ($7865.79, less than we had expected), and then get confirmation that insurance is going to pay it. As soon as those steps are done, she’ll call me to pick it up!!! Yay! Of course, we don’t want to inspect a paint job on a rainy, overcast day like today, but tomorrow will be soon enough! … As long as there’s nothing screwy with insurance. Can’t wait to get rid of the gangsta rental car!
UPDATE 2:52 PM: My wagon’s ready to come home! I’ll pick it up tomorrow. Happy, happy!
Lisa from Performance called me this morning about my wagon. The body shop is done, but they’re waiting on a washer fluid cap and transmission fluid (it’s not standard ATF but Dexron Mercron III). As soon as it’s drive-able, they’ll drive to the Mercedes dealership (hmm, I should have asked which one; Leith in Raleigh has never impressed me with service) to take care of the alignment and of turning off the airbag warning light (as a result of replacing the door). Lisa said Mercedes is pretty good about a one-day turn-around (for them!), so she’ll probably call tomorrow … either to give me an update, or to schedule a pick-up! Hurrah!!! So that was very nice to hear: my wagon is on the finishing up stage and I might see it soon. It has been over a month now, and that Dodge Magnum is not an impressive replacement (in comparison to my Mercedes, this Magnum has poor suspension, a loud engine, bald tires, and cigarette stink that’s getting stronger and older with time; only those last two are cure-able relative to what I’m used to driving).
I had yet-another prenatal appointment this morning. (Prenatal visits are strongly correlated with healthier babies, so I know it’s important. On the other hand, I’ve also seen a research study that you don’t need nearly as many prenatal visits as are standard for that benefit as long as there’s a nurse to call with any questions between appointments. So I’m not kicking about prenatal visits in general, but every other week seems frequent especially since I know we don’t need that many visits.) I took the 1-hour glucose challenge first thing in the morning for the last appointment, and my reading landed in the gray zone. Given morning cortisol levels, a very early glucose challenge is the most challenging. The doctor wanted to do the 3-hour challenge, but going without breakfast until lunchtime would trigger a migraine for me. So instead I came in for a fasting glucose draw, and took the 1-hour glucose challenge in the afternoon. I did not feel right for the morning glucose challenge; I felt as fine for the afternoon glucose challenge as you can after drinking something that’s way too sweet when you normally drink water.
Ironically (since the point was to avoid how long I went without breakfast), I sat in the waiting room for half an hour this morning before my appointment, so I was pretty hungry when I saw the nurse for that blood draw. The nurse started with the usual routine of taking my weight. The rule of thumb is that I should gain a pound a week in the third trimester, so she started with, “You’re down half a pound since two weeks ago.” I gave her a withering look (sorry, but I was hungry, cranky, and bored from sitting for half an hour) and said, “I’m here for a fasting glucose draw, and I’m starved.” Bless her, she skipped the rest of the routine and sent me straight to the blood draw.
This doctor is herself 14 weeks pregnant, and I heard her from down the hall saying, “What? Get that girl some food!” So I started eating the cereal bar I made last night just for this morning. Don’t know if it were hunger or just that good, but that bar tasted great! The doctor apologized for her cold hands when she started to measure me. At first she was worried that Thumper was very big, but he was just getting as far under my ribs as he could for some reason. Thumper ran away from the cold touch, and then I measured normal (32 inches at almost 32 weeks, and the rule of thumb in third trimester is to measure in inches where you are in weeks). The heart rate monitor was also cold, so he kept kicking it and trying to get away from it, so the monitor never got a lock on his heart rate. However, it sounded like 150 bpm to both of us, and what with moving all around, he sure seemed healthy, so that was good enough.
Yeah, that prenatal visit got a lot better once I got some food. So let’s stop the fasting tests!
