Round Two: The Unhappy in Pursuit of the Unavailable

Next attempt to get my Powerbook fixed: I talked to Apple Support, and they gave me the number for the Apple Store on Regent Street, to see if they might be able to resurrect Plan A.

Next problem: you can only get to deal with the "Genius" Bar if you have an appointment. And you can only book an appointment on-line. But you can't book an appointment for a particular day—you can only book appointments for today (unless you pay an extra £80 a year for ProCare). And when I checked the site at 9:03am and 10:30am today, it told me: "Unfortunately, there are no more reservations available today. Please check back tomorrow."

It makes booking an appointment with a GP seem positively straightforward.

Round One: Lying scum

After talking to Apple Support, it sounded like fixing my memory problem would be fairly straightforward, if a bit of a hassle. Plan A:

1. I'd take the machine into a service centre to confirm the fault.
2. They would order a new logic board.
3. In the meanwhile, I could limp along with half memory.
4. When the board came in, they would call me and I'd go back to the service centre to have the board replaced.

I spoke to my nearest service centre, who confirmed that this was how it would work and said that I could just pop in and they would do step 1 there and then.

So today I left work early and drove down to Islington in the rain to visit the service centre, only to discover that the lying scum now claimed that the only way they would fix the problem would be Plan B:

1. Leave the machine with them.
2. At some point thereafter, they would confirm the fault and order a new logic board.
3. Some days thereafter (up to 10, presumably working, days) the new logic board would arrive.
4. Sometime thereafter they would exchange the board and call me.
5. I would then pick up the fixed machine.

Spot the difference between Plan A and Plan B?

Not having at all prepared to do without my main machine (with our bug system, code repository and all my personal email on it) for three weeks, I left and drove home in the rain.

Thanks for (half of) the memory

I'd been wondering for the last few days why my Powerbook seems to be running much more slowly than usual, and I think I've determined the answer: it's only recognizing half of the 1024 MB of memory.

Looks like I'm not alone in having this problem.

MathML: the Revenge

Hey, it looks like they fixed the MathML font problems with Firefox under Mac OS X when I wasn't looking.

Hmm, I wonder if blogger allows MathML:

$\frac{\left(Y+A\right)\left(2Y+X\right)\left(\frac{{\left(X-2Y\right)}^4}{{\left(X^2-4Y^2\right)}^2}+1\right)}{4Y^2+X^2}$

I guess not (at least, not without some template fiddling)