Tag: Blade Runner

Lost in time, like tears in rain

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 14 Comments
We got 0.38 inch of rain in about 0.38 minute last night. Unlike Apple’s customer service, it was excellent.

Time to die. For my mid-2014 MacBook Pro, anyway.

I should’ve signed a DNR instead of the usual shit-happens waiver when I dropped the 15-inch MBP off to have its swollen battery replaced and overworked fans checked out, or just pulled the SSD and recycled the remains. At some point between handing it over to the “Genius” and paying $267.99 for the battery replacement the display managed to get itself FUBARed and now I have a laptop that can’t be used as … well, as a laptop.

Looks brand-new, dunnit?

One sees little need for a $267.99 battery in a 10-year-old MacBook that requires an external display to be useful. Mobile this is not. My lap isn’t that big.

Straight answers regarding just what occurred were not forthcoming. There were only the shrugs, the averted eyes, the mumbling about the advanced age of the MacBook. And the “give us your money” part, which — unlike the MacSurgery — proved successful.

But that shit’s on me. I knew replacing the battery was a real job of work — which was why I handed it off to the “Genius” instead of tackling it myself — and I wanted to keep the old MacDawg hunting. Should’ve saved my pennies for the new smaller-and-better-than-ever M4 Mini said to be coming down the pike later this year.

At one memorable point in my inquest, the local “Geniuses” were not answering their phone and Apple’s phone-answering droid punted me to global customer service, where a human lateraled me back to the ABQ Apple Store, where after 10 minutes on hold the person who finally picked up thought I was customer service.

“I can help them with that, go ahead and put them on.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“I can help them with that, put them on.”

“I am the customer.”

“Oh….”

I briefly considered going Full Mad Dog on these rotten Apples and their Samsung-level customer service. But what the hell? Even counting its two battery replacements that old Pro earned what I spent on it a hundred times over. Nothing lasts forever, though I have other MacBooks from 2014, 2012, and 2006, plus a G4 PowerBook from 2005, whose displays —¡que milagro! — still display. I can still use this one as a desktop until when — or if — I decide to modernize.

Tell you what, though. I’ll be shipping any future repair jobs to Apple’s main fix-’em-up plant, and buying any new product directly from Cupertino. I remain a firm believer in supporting local businesses, but our local “Geniuses” have seen the last of Your Humble Narrator.

R.I.P., Anthony Bourdain

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 17 Comments

Anthony Bourdain was working on a project to bring a market modeled on Singapore’s hawker centers to Manhattan. He wanted it to bring to mind “Blade Runner” — “high-end retail as grungy, polyglot dystopia.”

It seems the chef, globetrotter and raconteur Anthony Bourdain decided to burn out rather than fade away.

I can’t really say I was a fan; more of a bemused admirer, and from a safe distance, too. I read “Kitchen Confidential,” and my main takeaway beyond “Hell, no, I don’t ever want to cook in a pro kitchen” was that he’d be a tough dude to spend a lot of time around, even if you weren’t working for him.

But man, did he ever find his place in the world. Actually, not so much “find” as “create.” It seems now that his life may have been one extended, complicated suicide attempt. “Kill me if you can, but in the meantime get the fuck out of my way because I got all this cool shit to do.”

This New Yorker piece by Patrick Radden Keefe examines Bourdain’s raison d’être, the original pitch for his evolving, “increasingly sophisticated iterations” of the same TV program:

“I travel around the world, eat a lot of shit, and basically do whatever the fuck I want.”

It may also contain his epitaph. Bourdain was a movie buff, and “Blade Runner” comes up a couple of times in the piece. I thought immediately of the conversation between Roy Batty and Eldon Tyrell, the chat which ended so badly for Batty’s creator:

“The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long. And you have burned so very, very brightly, Roy.”

Batty would eventually check out, too. But not by his own hand.