Saturday 04/01/2023
First thing this morning was to start with the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. This is an annual deal, where a couple hundred competitors sit in rows in a hotel in Connecticut and solve crosswords competitively. And another several hundred pay $50 for the privilege of solving the same puzzles online. I had paid my fee and was ready to go.
And I bombed. On the first puzzle I went over it for the first pass and filled in three words. Second pass, added one more word. You had 15 minutes to finish the puzzle or your score for the puzzle would be zero. Or you could turn it in with. 95% of the blanks, still blank, and get a score very close to zero. And there would be no way to recover from that.
Last year I was in the middle of the pack, 180 out of 283. But with a zero on the first puzzle… fuggedaboutit. I closed the web page and wrote off the tournament.
I went for a walk, stopping at the downtown farmer’s market for the first time in months. Did a little on the model. Then about 2pm I did something to my MacBook. I had leaned it on the side of my easy chair, and I sat down and thought, maybe that’s squishing the computer? I got up and pulled it out and it looked fine. No dent or scratch or anything. But when I opened it up — the screen stayed black. It was alive. If I forced it to reboot, it made the startup “bong” noise. And, this is a trick I learned at the Genius Bar, just look at the Caps Lock key as you press it. If the little green LED comes on for caps lock, the OS is alive.
So I carried the MacBook to the Apple Store where I was able to get a Genius slot right away. The Genius couldn’t help, but he took the machine and said it should be ready for pickup by the end of the week. It is still in warrantee so no cost.
Then home and got out the OLD MacBook, the one that I was going to give away, but it works better with the auditorium equipment than the new one so I kept it. And here we are.
Codgerville 