[ABSTRACT: Brent’s laptop fries itself, and then Brent is asked to spin when he cannot. And then his dog poops. *sob*]

Early this afternoon I was trying to do something productive with my Pismo (i.e. “ancient”) PowerBook on my front porch, when the computer starts acting up. First it can’t find my wireless connection; then it gripes about not having any room and asks me to force quit an application or three. I restart, figuring that should clear everything up.

The computer starts up, gets to (and pauses on) the gray Apple logo… and then immediately jumps to the blue “shutting down” screen. It stays that way until the screen goes dark (but not like normal—there’s weird color-shifting blobs of almost-black that appear, first), and the rest of the machine continues spinning at nothing.

I run DiskWarrior on the disk; the PowerBook starts up perfectly from the CD, and DiskWarrior gets to the point where it’s looking for information… and then the progress bar freezes. The hard drive makes periodic “skritch skritch thunk” noises. After a few minutes of this, DiskWarrior informs me via a parenthetical statement that its speed has been “inhibited by disk malfunction.” This means one of two things: either my disk has some bad blocks at a bad place, or else the disk is just plain FUBARed.

Hoping it was the former, I connected my PowerBook to my desktop using Firewire target disk mode (reducing the powerbook to an expensive external hard drive); the disk mounts fine, and I’m able to copy my important files off of it.

Afterwards I start formatting the drive; a few minutes into that, I remember a couple of other files that would have been nice to have. I kiss them goodbye.

I’ve since reinstalled Mac OS X on the computer, but it’s still acting flakey; I’m not sure I’ll ever trust it with data again. Grrr.

…

By the time I got to my dance class this evening, my brain was mush. I managed to hold together fairly well, through some miracle, until the last fifteen minutes of class: at that time, we tried a move that required the leads to spin themselves.

If this were Harold and Kumar, my line would be Spinning! My only weakness! How did you know? As it is, I just sucked. Bad. (On the positive side, I’ve now added “spinning” to my list of things to learn how to do right.)

…

Then Yoshi decided to go on a real walk this evening, right when I was supposed to meet Brian at the Beanery.

To quote Brian: Pain ga daisuki desu!