Entries this day: Battery_reset Words_words_words a_lot_mo'_words

Battery reset

9:48am JST Saturday 22 December 2007 (day 13786)

Okay, I'm running a white MacBook 1.83 GHz Intel Core Duo, and my battery said 86% and the machine just powered off. No sleep, no warning, just off.

I looked over and my power cord was unplugged from the wall. I hadn't noticed that detail. Ooops. But 86%!

I thought this would be a good time to do a battery reset: I unplugged the computer, removed the battery, pressed the power button for 5 seconds. And by 5 seconds I mean five times for about 10 to 20 seconds each.

Put the battery back in, (did *not* plug in the power), and turned it on. It powered on no problem, and the battery reported 85%.

Now the battery is reporting 80%, which sucks balls for sure, but it's proof (to me) that the battery reset did *something*.

OTOH, I had a couple of Apps open before the (*)

10:13am JST Saturday 22 December 2007 (day 13786)

(*) I was going to say before the first power off, but it powered off again (at 79% battery).

So though the reset works (a little bit), it didn't work very well for me.

I did a series of power-ons with no battery resets, and power-ons with resets to see what would happen in various cases. Summary: resets helped a little bit, but the battery still sucks.

Details:

• No reset

• died before I could enter my login credentials

• No reset

• died just as login window came up

• reset 30 seconds

• login screen stable for a minute, then the monitor powered off and the sleep light came on, but the HD was still whirring.

• I waited a bit to see if it would put the HD to sleep or die first, but I was too eager to get this little experiment finished so I can write it down and work on my novel.

• logged in and it died as I was jotting down (on paper) that I had been using a USB-powered optical mouse at the time of the first power-off and had just plugged it in. (i.e. it dies after about 2 minutes of being on, just around the time that the top bar was being filled with icons after I had logged in)

• No reset, power on to see if I could check the battery status.

• entered my login credentials, but it died before the top bar could be filled in

• reset 15 seconds

• logged in without plugging in the mouse

• 71% battery reported and then dead before anything else

Well, that was a fun little waste of time, but it provided a long (though boring) journal entry.

Going to work on my novel now.

Words words words

5:19pm JST Saturday 22 December 2007 (day 13786)

(spoiler alert warning)

Sweet. I just wrote this as the commit message for my latest SVN of the Castle of Dreams novel:

Scout and Alex are in the cave; it's getting dark outside and about to storm, though they don't know
that.  They've found the secret of the rock cave, but they don't yet know what it is.  Also, I just
got exactly to 37,000 words without specifically trying.

a lot mo' words

9:52pm JST Saturday 22 December 2007 (day 13786)

Sweet. I'm now up to 38637 words in my story. Having an exciting plot seems to whip things right along. I'm a bit tired of typing, ana a bit stuck on how to get them out alive (or to kill one or both), but I'd rather get them out alive, but not in too cheesy of a way.

Sweet. And I just have to type 1420.375 words per day to make 50,000 by the end of the 30th.