…if I hadn’t poured a pint of beer on my Macbook last week.
So annoying.

I took it to the Apple store, who happily replaced my cracked top case, keyboard and trackpad (unrelated to the beer incident), but declined to replace anything else because, well, “We opened it up, and it smelled like beer.”

I ordered a replacement “logic board” (what the rest of the world used to call a motherboard, but which kids today are calling a mainboard) from eBay. I spent last night pulling the Macbook into very many pieces and attempting to replace the logic board. I got the “new” (it was used) one mostly installed when I realized that the temperature probes wouldn’t plug into the board, because the connections were different.

I blame Intel’s lame naming system. Intel’s 32bit dual core chip was called an, “Intel Core Duo” and their newer 64-bit dual core chip was called, “Intel Core 2 Duo.” This naming scheme seems to have confused most everyone in the world. The Core 2 Duo is a brand new, totally different chip and way better than the old Core Duo. Macbooks originally came with Core Duos and then later, Core 2 Duos.

My Macbook shipped with an Intel Core 2 Duo 2.0ghz chip. The logic board I ordered had a 2.0ghz Intel Core Duo chip on it. Which is way slower and won’t work with my old heatsink, and probably not my 64-bit OS either.

Fortunately the folks I bought the logic board from said they’d take it back, less a 20% restocking fee. Which is fair, but still a pricey mistake on my part. I could probably resell it on eBay, but after the fees and hassle, this seemed reasonable enough.

So I ordered the correct logic board (for a whopping $10 more than the last one I ordered) from someone else, but this means yet another few weeks without the Macbook.

I flew through a hurricane, got stuck in Boston, shot my first real instrument approach (down to 400 feet), and am finally starting to get almost comfortable in the plane. After I figure it all out, I’m sure they’ll ship me off to the CRJ-200. It looks like reserve for the next bid as well (mid-Sep to early October), and it seems unlikely that I’ll have a line after that, either.