After getting a new hard-drive and RAM module, my macbook is happy once more. They even managed to rescue all my files. They did a fresh and up-to-date install of the OS and ran a disk-recovery program on the old drive. The only damaged files evidently were temp files in the OS -- all of my documents and data were fine. Amazing. It was inconvenient to have to lose my laptop for 5 days, but it was a relief to get all my data back.
It was an incredibly busy week at work getting ready for the start of the new semester. We are trying to bring up a half-dozen computer labs in the new Integrated Science Building. Little by little, issues are getting resolved and we take two steps forward and one step back. Yesterday, I discovered they'd installed crappy projectors in the labs, rather than the high-contrast projectors we'd specified. I ran a test today to confirm that the projectors are inadequate: they are. In biological imagery -- especially micrographs, the details really require dynamic range. Cheap projectors can't display enough range for details to not be lost through clipping at the high or low end of the brightness range. We had specified projectors with 2000:1 contrast, but they installed 1600:1. You can really see the difference. But tracking it down was just one more thing I had to do today on a day when I really didn't have the time.
- Steven D. Brewer's blog
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