The nice thing about writing a little ‘signup’ application for a class that your wife teaches is that you have full control over the hijacking of that application any time you feel like it. See figure one:

Fortunately for me I didn’t get shot down, and we got some Gold Class seats at VivoCity.

Today, unfortunately, is not turning out nearly as good as yesterday. My mac is seriously on the fritz exhibiting the following completely random and seemingly unrelated ‘features’.

1. Adium can not connect to any of the IM protocols I have configured including Yahoo, MSN, AIM and GTalk.
2. Microsoft Word opens all files as Read-Only so if I want to modify them I have to “Save As…” first.
3. Although CPU usage is completely normal, the entire systemm locks up at random, and I can barely switch between applications or type at a normal speed.
4. My Airport signal strength indicator is in a “permanent off” state. My laptop is 100% convinced that my Airport is turned off, but I’m connected wirelessly to my network as I post this.
5. DNS is completely screwed. I have to hit Shift-Reload sometimes 3, 4 or 5 times to get a page to show up in FireFox or Safari because it can’t seem to resolve random hosts. (This could partially, maybe, explain the Adium behavior.)
6. Random applications terminate as soon as I start them. Yesterday it was Remote Desktop Connection. I would start it up to connect to a Windows box, and it would terminate before I could do anything. Today it’s photoDrop droplets that are crapping out.
7. Mail.app won’t download any of my Mail (potentially also could be related to network issues, I suppose).
8. Often when I start an application (say, TextMate or iPhoto for example) – I can’t click on any of the menu items in the menu bar. They’re locked. Which means I’m limited to only being able to use the functionality of the app that I remember via keyboard shortcuts, until it magically decides at some point in the future (20 minutes, 40 minutes – it’s all a great guessing game) when it decides it will permit me to now click on said menu items.

As I’m typing this, SuperDuper! has just finished backing up all my user files, and Mr. Laptop is now going to receive a full enema. I sure hope that this isn’t a hardware problem, or I’ll be severely unimpressed. At least the thing is under warranty. But if Apple is going to take my laptop for a week while they try to figure out what’s going wrong – I might have switched to Ubuntu by the time they give it back to me.