Everybody Loves Saturday Night: the plan

Yesterday, in addition to being Bastille Day, was the fourth anniversary of this blog. No wait: fifth. (Whoa. Wild!) In honor of this milestone, I've been inspired by several other bloggers to embark on 365 Days of Posting. Four months ago I don't think I would've felt up to the challenge. Today it doesn't feel like a challenge so much as an . . . imperative. (A moral one, at that.) (No, only kidding; that's from a movie.)

In unrelated, sadder news: the iMac celebration was premature, I'm afraid. Saturday's boot-up led to another kernel panic, or the same one, or the Son of Kernel Panic, or something . . . the point is, I got that multilanguage "You must restart your computer" message again. Sunday morning, and into the afternoon, I went through all the troubleshooting I could in order to fix it myself, but this time I was unsuccessful. And unwilling to let it sit for another four months (which I shouldn't have done in the first place, but, you know, bygones). So I packed it up and hopped a cab to Tekserve, which . . . is really a glorious place, you know.

I got there at 4:30, knowing they close at 6:00 on Sundays, hoping that it wouldn't be too busy. And it wasn't. I was given a ticket with the number 41 on it; they were currently on number 38. I only had about a 20-30 minute wait. So far, so good.

My number got called, I explained to the Mac dude what had happened, what I did to try and resolve it, and what had initially caused the kernel panic to begin with (at least, I think it did -- way back in February I accidentally jostled the power cord while the iMac was on and it came unplugged from the monitor side). Mac dude did a couple voodoo-y things and then came back with "we can take it in for diagnostics." He said it could be one of two things: either bad RAM (which is the most common cause of kernel panics, from what I understand), which is easy to fix, or a bad logic board, which is not easy and extremely expensive to fix. The good news either way is that my hard drive is not affected. The bad news is that if it is the logic board I might as well go ahead and get a new computer. Truthfully, I've been wanting to get a laptop for a while now, but I would have to take a chunk out of my savings to do that and then put off the camera purchase, any hope of travel in the next six months, the air filter I want to get, and so on. This is also assuming that I don't get a new job and/or more freelance work within the next three months as I am hoping to do.

(Oh yeah, I'm looking for work. I either need immediate supplemental freelance work writing/editing stuff, either print or online, or a full-time gig in print/web production that pays a living wage. I have a bottom line; my current situation is about 5K under that. My company cannot meet my salary requirement because they're a small startup and they're being conservative with the budget. Which is understandable and fine for them, but unacceptable for me. Yes, they are aware of my circumstances.)

I should know the status of my computer by Thursday. Let's hope it's the inexpensive easy fix.