Sorry for the extended outage, but it’s been a little scary around here, what with the crashing PowerBook.

You may have noticed the sudden appearance of a backlog of postings on my other weblog on Thursday or Friday. Imagine my trepidation of putting my faith in the machine after that series of Pure Evil I documented a couple weeks ago. On the one hand, when I had the original RAM in the machine, there wasn’t enough to do much other than the barest minimum of tasks. On the other, since I was replacing the third party RAM with more third party RAM, I wasn’t really sure whether the problem was a matter of RAM failure, of system failure, or some sort of incompatibility between them.

So, anyway, the replacement RAM arrived this past Monday. I was extra-special careful and brought the laptop down to the product development lab, located the appropriate tools, and used an ESD (electrostatic discharge) wrist strap and an ESD-protected bench surface. The RAM went in without incident, the laptop came back up, and it’s been running ever since. I should note particularly that each time the laptop started acting strangely it had just before been subject to rather extreme heat; I’m sure it was well within spec but running Virtual PC, Xcode builds, or BZFlag tends to push the machine. I’ve done one or more of these at least once a day since I installed the new stuff. (Oh, joy…)

I have a short backlog of items to post from my hiatus. I’ll crank them out as soon as I can. Until then…