I don’t want to jinx it but Apple may have really come through for us. Shannan and I were planning to make and sell Watchercast decals to help raise the money to fix ‘Buffy’ (Yes, I named my laptop Buffy). These would NOT be cheap-o bumper stickers but cut vinyl decals made the same way I added this logo to ‘Buffy’.

But a friend of the show offered some advice on contacting Apple Care. We may not have to do the telethon just yet.

So, as Jason said here, the Watchercast is having what we hope is a brief hiatus.  So, while you’re waiting, I figured I would throw up what I found to be a reeeeally satisfying YouTube clip that was talked about on one of the podcasts I listen to each week.

Buffy would be a MUCH better foil for Edward than Bella.  Yay kick ass women!

This podcast is produced on an Apple MacBook Pro. (15″ 2.2ghz Core 2 Duo, model A1226, manufactured mid 2007 with the NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT graphics chip to be exact) This father’s day morning I lifted the lid of the MacBook Pro … and saw nothing. The screen was black but the keys were lit and when I tried to raise the volume or brightness I heard the familiar ‘Dwak Dwak’ sounds. But nothing. Plugging in an external monitor also offered no look at what was actually happening on the computer. I know it is running, I even plugged in my backup drive and could see that Time Machine started running it’s backup (So all the data is safe).

Trying not to panic I used my iPod touch to Google around and found this on the Apple site: http://support.apple.com/kb/TS2377 It looked like Apple was going to make good and this wasn’t going to be a disaster. Everything about my MacBook Pro meets all of the requirements listed on the Apple site. We have an Apple Store over at Easton so I made an appointment and took it in to get fixed.

Now the guy at the Genius Bar had an external drive, plugged it into my MacBook Pro and booted it into target disk mode. Still nothing came up on the screen. He takes the drive off of mine and plugs it into his Mac and brings up a report that simply stated “No eligible graphics chip found”. So even though The Watchercast MacBook Pro matches everything on the site and it’s doing exactly what is described on the site, that it isn’t covered by the no cost repair and since it is no longer covered by a warranty it will cost $310 to have the logic board replaced.

So here is the sad part. With Shannan only weeks away from giving birth to our second son, we just don’t have the money to get the laptop fixed right now. So for now The Watchercast is on hold and the laptop will sit until we have the extra money to get it fixed.

We’re trying to figure out some options to raise the money to have it replaced. Until then we’ll keep you all posted on any progress we make. We appreciate each and every one of you that listen to us and are so engaged in this show with us. Thanks for sticking with us as we try to fix this.

So a new exploit was out for Wordpress and we got hit like many other sites. We’ve yanked out the offending code and have taken steps to avoid getting hit and making it easier for us to remove the nasty code when it does get in. So if you got a warning that this site might hurt your computer that was why and we’ve fixed it.