Ensconced in Tony Victoria

It was a whirlwind week of meetings, appointments, errands and a conference in Vancouver last week. On Saturday I made the move across the water and have taken occupancy of our Fairfield apartment.

I’m pretty happy with it. It’s a modern reno inside the shell of a 1912 heritage house, with some original features (doors, floors, stained glass) retained. The office upstairs is big and bright, and has a rooftop deck off it with views of the Olympic peninsula and downtown. It’s furnished down to the face clothes and grapefruit knives, which is awesome. One trip to the grocery store and I’m ready to work.

It took Shaw Cable two trips to get my internet access working, but at least they were on time, honest and efficient. Julie’s in Morocco for another two weeks with her sister, so I expect to get plenty of work done.

One thorn in my productivity is that I had to take my MacBook into the shop. About three months ago, the fan started to sound like a crippled Sea King helicopter. It was seriously loud, and it would often rev and spin out. The surface temperature of the laptop increased, and I started seeing worrying behaviour in graphics-intensive apps like World of Warcraft.

Given that the thing is less than six months old, I’m underwhelmed. I count myself lucky that it didn’t melt down in Morocco, where I suspect that there’s a dearth of Apple stores.

I took it into Soho Computer Services here in Victoria. They’d only had it for four hours when they called to confirm my diagnosis–the fan is shot. Kudos to them for the quick turn-around.

Hopefully I’ll have my muted, cooled MacBook back by the weekend. In the meantime, I’m using our underpowered G5 iMac. It’s in desperate need of a RAM upgrade, but it’ll have to wait until I get my laptop back.