recursion

Here's Scott Adams's financial advice:

1. Make a will
2. Pay off your credit cards
3. Get term life insurance if you have a family to support
4. Fund your 401k to the maximum
5. Fund your IRA to the maximum
6. Buy a house if you want to live in a house and can afford it
7. Put six months worth of expenses in a money-market account
8. Take whatever money is left over and invest 70% in a stock index fund and 30% in a bond fund through any discount broker and never touch it until retirement
9. If any of this confuses you, or you have something special going on (retirement, college planning, tax issues), hire a fee-based financial planner, not one who charges a percentage of your portfolio

Apparently he wanted to publish a one page book with this advice.

Last night, I was happily hacking away with Emacs and a couple terminals open, and then bam my MacBook shut off suddenly.

I stared in surprise for a moment at the black screen, then turned the machine back on. It started booting, and then turned itself off like before. I unplugged the AC power and tried again. No luck.

Oh, shit, I'm thinking. What about my data? I should have backed up. I'll have to take it in to get it fixed. But I'm going to RubyConf next week!

Sigh.

So I tired taking out the battery and replacing it, and for some reason that worked.

I did a little research and found out that this problem is pretty common with MacBooks. There's a website devoted to the problem, Apple has acknowledged the issue, and some users are organizing a class-action lawsuit. Some guy even got a video of the random shutdown happening at the Apple store (note: for me, the video pauses at 8 seconds. If you skip past that you can see the shutdown).

The problem is apparently caused by a short circuit where some wires melt to the heatsink.

Marc Zeedar suggested maxing out both processors with yes > /dev/null & yes > /dev/null would allow him to reliably reproduce the problem, but that didn't work for me. So far, it hasn't happened again. My plan is to back up my data, take it to Denver for RubyConf, and then replace it.