Electric Fence Zine: Mauritius

Dear travelogues reader,

I know that I should blog for often.

however, that said, blogging is difficult when you're busy battling a never-ending onslaught of laptop woes... my exact situation. My computer problems are both chronic and terminal. My woes began in November 2006, when my laptop cord developed an electrical short and my comp stopped charging. Three months and Two creative but sort-lived patch-up jobs later, my computer stopped turning on at all, and I finally resigned myself to buying a brand new adapter. After a little searching, I was able to find a variable output adapter with swappable plugs for 1,300 rupees (40 USD).

Malheuresement, ça n'a rien fait. Said new adapter worked for exactly two weeks, if your definition of working allows for receiving mind-numbing electrical shocks when you brush up against your laptops metal components (i.e. the speakers that span its entire front end).

From here, I came up with the gloriously DIY solution of covering all trouble areas on my laptop with electrical tape (which acts as a sort of insulator), and running my computer at reduced wattage-- 15V instead of the 18.5V necessary to both run the computer and charge the battery.

This week, however, my PC stopped charging once more and when the battery died on Wednesday, I was completely out of luck. To my delight, I got the laptop running again this evening.. however, talk about a premature declaration of victory...

As of today: 6 keys on my keyboard are completely non-operational(!) Those being:
g
h
the quotation mark
backspace
the function button
the escape button

[Consequently, the only reason i was able to write this entry was grâce à the delete key and the venerable keyboard shortcuts Cltl+C & Cltl+V. Every instance of g & h in this post has been copied and pasted.]

In addition, my computer refuses to restart or go on standby.

Now, while rants like this one are ordinarily perfect opportunities for Mac users to gloat about the piteous state of PCs and the superiority of Apple products, here are two points for Apple dilettantes to consider:

A. My friend Chris's 8 month old Macbook has completely stopped charging. Since his arrival in Mauritius (i.e. turns off as soon as it gets unplugged from the wall outlet), and
B. My roommate Alyssa's ibook shocks the hell out of her, too.

Unfortunately, while the Mac-PC parity does wonders for my ego, it does nothing to rectify my sad sad situation. If circumstances do not improve, I may be forced to go old school and start writing my field notes, memos and transcripts by hand. In the meantime, be on the look out for posts that just graduated from drafts to proper entries (a few below, backdated to reflect the date of 1st draft).

Labels: blogkeeping

Posted by east of madagascar on Thursday, February 15, 2007 at 9:33 PM | Permalink