Well, this is craptastic

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My MacBook will no longer connect to the internet through airport. There’s no wifi ability at all.

Worse, it’s out of warranty by at least a year.

It would be nice if this were easily fixable, but I sorta doubt it. I’ll give it the old college try tonight (although I’m not sure how). After that I have to decide if I should just carry an ethernet cable with me to the library to enable my Dropbox backup, or Pikachu help me, buy another.

It’s really the wrong time for my sturdy little laptop to not be so sturdy.

12 thoughts on “Well, this is craptastic

  1. Nick Sharps

    I just had to buy a new freaking charger for my MacBook because the magnetic pins wore out or something. If I had bought it from Apple I woulda had to pay $80. Luckily I got it half price from Amazon.

  2. Brian

    I know this isn’t really related to the topic, but I had a question for you Harry, and it probably wouldn’t hurt to get input from other readers as well. So here it is:

    I was getting ready to reread Christopher Paolini’s ‘Inheritance Cycle’ books 1-3 in preparation for book 4 coming out this Tuesday. Sadly, for me at least, a friend is borrowing them and will not have them back in time. So I started wondering what to do and something occurred to me. What is your viewpoint on pirated copies of ebooks in a situation where the user already has a legitimate copy, bought and paid for?

    I thought of this while I was watching some movies, and noticing how many come with digital copies in addition to the DVD or Blu-Ray you purchase. And while piracy is still wrong, and takes away from the author, I wondered how different this scenario is from me typing the book up verbatim in MS Word and converting to an ebook file to use on my reader while traveling.

    No I don’t do that currently either, mostly because it’s a lot of work, but I’m not sure where I stand on this issue yet and am reluctant to move forward until I decide. I had hoped to read the series again before the book I ordered shows up after work on Tuesday so that I could move right into the new one.

    I wouldn’t even be considering it if the friend borrowing it was able to bring it back later in the week, but we get together sporadically and I’m not liable to get my copies back until late November at the earliest and more likely late December to early January and I don’t really want to wait that long to read a new book.

    No matter which side of the issue I come at it from, I keep running into that annoying little voice in my head going “but this…” or “but that…” and can’t quite nail down where I stand on the issue.

    Under normal circumstances I’m somewhat divided on piracy already as while it is wrong and takes away from the people who work so hard to bring us our books, games, movies, etc., it’s also the only way that some people are ever going to enjoy said material due to whatever reason prevents them. And isn’t that what most creators want, someone to enjoy their work? While of course getting paid as much as they can for it.

    But I find myself treating this as a special circumstance and that makes it even harder to decide on, so I was hoping for some input, first and foremost from yourself since you are an author and would understand the issues involved better than I might, and also from the community in general so that I might make a more informed decision. Any advice would be appreciated.

  3. Brian

    In addendum, I mentioned the digital copies of movies that come packaged with physical discs because I was going to point out that since books don’t happen to do this yet it raised the question.

  4. I don’t really have an interest in the subject, which has been debated elsewhere ad nauseum. People will do what they like, and the only mechanism to stop them from taking things they don’t have a right to would be worse than the taking itself, so I’m not terribly invested in the subject.

  5. Brian

    Ok, I didn’t realize it had been removed elsewhere, I just figured you’d have the most insight on the topic and figured it wouldn’t hurt to ask.

  6. Well, I don’t have much in the way of insight. I don’t live in a country where U.S. books are prohibitively expensive, don’t read ebooks, don’t pirate software or films, and don’t torrent or fileshare.

    So I’m really not well versed on the subject.

  7. Brian

    Normally I wouldn’t read ebooks either, but I got a brand new Kindle off a friend for half off retail because she had an extra. That coupled with the free books available on amazon.com and a gift card I got from a survey gave me some incentive to lug the reader to work and elsewhere rather than the backpack full of books I used to carry. Granted, when possible at home, I still choose a book over an ebook because it’s a better experience in my opinion.

    As for the cost, no the ebooks aren’t prohibitively expensive, and while I do torrent on occasion, I try to reserve it for shows I missed on tv the night before since many networks don’t add a streaming option until 8 days later, and as soon as I finish watching, I delete them.

    It was just kind of a situational question, which is kind of moot now, my books are on their way back and I’ll only have to wait a few extra days to read the new one.

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