Have Power, will Travel
I'm starting to feel marginally caught up, but gawd this has really sucked. A vicious storm came through (generating a tiny lil tornado), shearing off the poles at the major power station on the south side. 60,000 people without power, all on the south side... most of the damage was localized within a few blocks in all directions in our neighborhood... meaning our area was in the last 1,000 getting power back.
Luckily I was able to leech net access (and AC) from a friend for a few days off and on to stay marginally in touch and to handle big problems, and to upload/download work. But gawd, it was four days, and another day for net access as the storm had ripped the cable modem line from the house.
The one thing that really came to mind was laptop batteries during the whole experience... often when I'm traveling, it isn't that big of a deal to me. IE, I know when I'm on the train I'll be plugging in in a few hours. Or if I'm on a plane, I can plug in at the hotel once I've reached where I'm going... but I was really trying to eek out every ounce of juice I could in the evenings.
First of all, the "up to 5 hours" thing Apple (and others) spout about their batteries is utter & complete nonsense. I can't believe there hasn't been some sort of lawsuit about it, similar to what happened with CRT display sizes. With those, you could at least see how they were arriving at their size's they gave. With these batteries...
I had my powerbook at the second brightness notch, doing nothing but working with text files & emails. Airport turned off, along with all network connectivity (appletalk, etc). No mp3's playing, nothing. Just answering emails to be sent out later, writing up documentation in Hydra or Mi. All energy saver options at the max. That's it. Occasionally with all the lights out I even worked it down to the very lowest brightness setting, which would have been impossible if there was any other ambient light.
Even with all of that, I was only about to get 4 hours & 30 minutes. Trying to watch a DVD wasn't even an option, although I was able to rip one to the hard drive and get 2 hours worth.
What's the moral of the story? My powerboook is thin as hell. Compared to my friend's P4 laptop, it's positively dainty. I'd easily give up a quarter inch in thickness to have real, usable battery life and to not have my fan become embarrassing loud whenever the ambient temperature in the room is above 78 degrees and the computer is at more than 10% load.
Posted by drunkenbatmanSeptember 03, 2003, at 04:40 PM
