Getting the Shakes

I said in my first post that I'd be away from the game for a week or so. And that may extend to more than a week.

(Hold me.)

Actually it's worse than that: my Mac is in the shop. So I'm without all my normal outlets -- most notably games and photography. And I can't buckle down and finish my taxes either. I can still get online via other machines we have in the house, but either they're owned by work (which means I can't install anything fun on them) or they're woefully underpowered for either WoW or photo work.

So what happened? The sad thing is that really, nothing happened. Rewind to a year or so ago. I'd been planning to buy a Macintosh for quite some time, and my savings added up at the same time that the first Macbook Pros were released. So I jumped into the world of Intel Macs. I knew the risks I was running, and I'd read the early problem reports, so I knew that I'd be taking some chances with it.

Really though, it hasn't been bad. For the most part, it has worked fine and done everything I've asked of it. It had just a couple minor issues. One was that I couldn't install memory in the second slot. The other was that it would occasionally reboot at random. Really just an annoyance, as I'm compulsive about saving repeatedly as I'm working on something. So even the occasional reboot wasn't a huge issue.

That is, until I started playing WoW.

It had happened several times for me. Some days everything would be fine, but some days it would reboot one or more times while I was playing. Always annoying, but of course much more so when I was in combat! The kicker for me was last week when I was partied up with Eric and DK. We were on the Collector quest. We had just jumped into combat with The Collector and his two cronies when the screen went black. I was, shall we say, agitated.

Truth was it wasn't going to be a problem; by the time I got back online I found that my hunter and warlock friends had tidily cleaned everything up. I was able to loot the corpse for the necessary ring. But still, I just missed an amusing fight. What's the point of that?

I rebooted again a short while later. This time, we were just departing Stormwind. My paladin was leading the way out the gates, when everything went black. Wait for reboot and get back onto Skype, only to find my friends still laughing. Evidently, when my machine went belly-up, my character kept on moving... long enough to walk right over the edge of the Valley of Heroes.

I'm so glad it was amusing for them, but frankly it was getting to be a bit much. My warranty was due to expire in the next month or so; it was time to get the thing fixed. And so Saturday morning I went to visit my local Apple store, and my machine is now on its way to the repair center. Fixing the reboot problem is crucial, and I'll also be excited to install that extra 1G SODIMM I've been sitting on.

So no gaming for me for a while. Frankly, it surprises me how much I miss it. But I'll find other things to do... for a while.