That's One Hot Lap!(top)

So over the course of my Black Friday, wherein I cooked an amazing dinner for my amazing wife's visit, I purchased a laptop off of Amazon. The Acer Aspire V5-171-6422 which has pretty good bang for the buck based on what I paid.

It was a busy week when it first arrived and I only had time to start playing with it about a week later. I managed to load much of my data and gave the machine its first full day of work from home. I programmed all day long on a script for my research when I had a thought about keeping all my work on Dropbox instead of syncing it all the time to a hard drive to take back and forth from work. It was a fleeting but good thought and I told myself I'd get to it later.

Cut to a few hours later when I was Skyping with my wife. We had decided on some things for her upcoming move here to Seattle when I received another call from my older sister. We were busying talking about my little nephew when suddenly the screen went blank. I couldn't figure out what happened but the laptop was clearly not turning on anymore!

Things seemed to be charging, but when I pressed the power button, the light would flash briefly and then... nothing. Looking over the entire unit for a problem, I suddenly saw this little hole - which I had previously thought was a noise-cancelling microphone. A closer inspection, however, told me it was not meant to be there.

So unfortunately, all the data I had accumulated over the day was lost because I did not follow my idea of linking to my Dropbox account!

Fast forward over a couple of weeks of emails, and phone calls and I was at a crossroads with Acer Corporate and Amazon. Should I return the machine to Amazon and let them deal with it or pass it on to Acer to repair. I hadn't really had enough time with the machine to know if I truly liked it or not. More importantly, my data was on the laptop AND there was not way to remove it without breaking my warranty!

In the end, I made the tough decision to pass it along to Acer just before Christmas. Their customer service was very nice and helped me to arrange its transport back. I was told that due to the possible safety hazard, they would require an engineer in Houston to take a look. At least this was an interesting situation! Well, a few days later I received another call saying the laptop would be fully replaced (say goodbye to my data!) AND they wanted my permission to send it along to another set of engineers in Taiwan for inspection.

Unfortunately the laptop arrived in Seattle while I was back home in Toronto but this is definitely the most interesting incident involving one of my electronics. I should note that for some reason, things have a habit of breaking on me. A quick laundry list includes

1. Galaxy Nexus: 2 months after buying it, the motherboard exploded. Fully replaced by Samsung, but I lost my cool photos.
2. iPod Nano (3rd generation?): simply died one day, after 3 years. Never figured out why.
3. Acer laptop (my first!): motherboard died after a year.
4. Hard drives (at least 3): definitely died due to random failures.
5. Toshiba LCD TV (another first!): died a couple weeks before my wedding. Puzzling that it chose to die mere months after the 4-year extended warranty.
6. Canon SD400 camera (also my first!): Dropped it about 1 foot from a well-carpeted floor. Never turned on again... also died just months after its long extended warranty was up.

I'm sure the list will continue to grow but a melted laptop screen definitely sits at the top now. And that's the story of one hot laptop.

It's Clemen-time :)

So it's been busy at work the past few weeks but I wanted to note that Clementine season is upon us! I already ate a small bag last week and "mistakenly" picked up a huge bag yesterday at the grocery store.









It will take me at least 3 days to eat through all of these... maybe 2. I also love eating these because they are much easier to transport in my bag than bananas. They may roll around a little but unlike bananas they don't bruise, get mushy and potentially explode all over your things. Even if exploding was a possibility, I can still bag them unlike my bananas. Aside from the more pragmatic aspects of the clementine, I just really love the taste! Little miniature oranges, sweet and tangy. Great for dropping in your pockets as a quick snack when you go out for a brisk afternoon walk!

I also forgot to post this amazing mushroom picture from about a month back. It was just growing outside work on the grass by the side of the street where cars park all day long. I only discovered it because we saw some folks pointing and taking pictures of something on the ground on day. We couldn't see what it was since it was behind a parked car so I ventured down for a look and was richly rewarded!

Check out that Mario-style mushroom! aka Amanita muscaria

Unfortunately, it was gone a couple days later. We suspect that it was perhaps taken for it's possible hallucinogenic effects. I would rather not try since the list of other symptoms really sound unpleasant. Of course, I'm really not looking for a good hallucination either.

Speaking of getting melty, I have a great story for another day but I'll wait until I resolve some issues before posting pictures. I will, however, leave you with this little gem I found parked on the street. Kinda... surreal. Those windows have been open for a couple of days now... and it's been raining. Hope their stuff is okay...

Stay classy Seattle!