Well, MacBook is back. For those of you who don’t know, here’s the story. Last week, on Tuesday, I woke up as usual. I went to my MacBook, and I turned the screen brightness back up. Or, at least, I tried. It was unresponsive. So, I tried various troubleshootings: close lid, hit spacebar, hit enter, hit eject disc, hit keyboard in frustration. None of those worked. I finally decided to hold in the power button to hard restart it.
The system went black. I waited a couple seconds, then I pushed the button again. The first sign of trouble was that the harddrive was clicking. That is never, never, never, never a good sign, and it’s usually a sign that you should have backed up your data about three minutes ago. After a long boot period I finally get something to show up: a blinking folder with a “?” on it. I’ve never come across that with my Mac, but I’ve used computers enough to know what it meant. It meant a trip to the MacDoctors.
Well, when they finally got it back to me, they gave me a new harddrive (unable to get data off the old one), fixed a crack in the top panel, and replaced a gouged delete key. All of which was covered under my warranty. Furthermore, I had backed up a little less than a month before, so things were pretty much all good (which some strange quirks and some missing data, but, oh, well). It was nice to start over.
My other super news is that I bought a Super8 camera on eBay. For those who don’t know what that is, it’s the most popular film camera ever invented. Basically, it’s a home video camera that was affordable, lightweight, and good enough for most families in the 60s, 70s and 80s. If it was all that then (and if inflation works the way I think it does) it should be mega-cheap now! Well, that’s not quite the case, but I don’t think this whole process won’t be too cost prohibitive.
For those who do know what that is, you’re wondering “Why?” Well, I’ve been reading The Filmmaker’s Handbook, and the book does a good job of convering video and film cameras in the beginning. The book made me think of all the advances made in technology, and that I feel a little less like a filmmaker and more like a videomaker. So, I wanted to get dirty, and now I am.
To my further benefit, after winning the auction, Holli discovered that her Dad had his Super8 camera and splicer (used for editing film or putting a couple small reels into one big one) and projector. The projector has a problem with the back reel, so when Holli and I checked out an old home video of the Gregg family, I had to manually rotate the back reel the whole time. All in all, I’m excited to find new and exciting uses for this old and boring equipment.
Easter was decent. Holli had to housesit over the weekend, so I was flying solo to Big Stone where I’d spend pretty much all of the weekend with Tony, who’s family also left him. Sue had an Easter brunch at her place, which was excellent. Tony helped me film, which included him saying, “I’m director, right?” every three minutes. Then he got tripod envy. I managed to con Sue into helping out, too, and she let us film in the school. Easter means a lot of Guitar Hero, a lot of church, and a lot of discovering more strange things about Hogan.
Check out the Super Gr8mm Photoset.
