Heart Stopping Cheap Geek Action!

There are times that being a cheap geek makes me more nervous than it is healthy to be. A few weeks ago while I was at work I was drinking a healthy drink (Dr. Pepper) then as I had done a thousand times before, I set it down next to my MacBook Pro. After about ten minutes of hard work on a different computer I forgot about the Dr. Pepper entirely. As I reached for a ringing phone my hand gracefully bumped the top of it and sent it spilling onto the uber expensive Mac. I manged to prevent most of it from bricking my laptop but enough of it got onto my keyboard to make the space bar stick... Needless to say, the space bar is a very important part of my typing experience, if I didn't have it allofmyblogswouldlooklikethis. I didn't think that my warranty would cover retards spilling soda on the keyboard, but I had to do something, and I did. I waited for about two months hoping that it would correct itself. Strange how hardware doesn't desticky itself. (Maybe Apple should look into developing that.) I looked online to see if were possible to rip keys off the keyboard and have any hope of using them again. I found this great website that shows how to completely tear apart every aspect (almost) of a 17" MacBook Pro. After reading it and then turning my Mac off, I proceeded to do the delicate surgery. I ripped the space bar off and found that this space bar was a bit of a pack-rat. Hair, wirey stuff, and yes Dr. Pepper had found its way into my space bar. Using great care and precision I removed the awful irritants. Then I smashed the key back into place. Strangely enough, it still worked!

In my long and wisdom filled life, I have found that being a Cheap Geek is more than buying junky hardware and putting up with disappointing software, its knowing how to make everything work together like a symphony of middle schoolers. Could have I called up Apple support and tell them that I was using my Mac for a rain gutter of soda? Yeah. Could I have forked out the money to have them fix my Mac? Possibly. But I say why not try to do it yourself and see if you can destroy it better than you have already! But seriously, many of the things that we need done can be done by ourselves for substantially less than someone else would charge us. Being a Geek is not as hard as some would think. The internet has everything that you could possibly need to find a solution to your problem. If you can't figure it out then you can always find someone else who knows how to in a forum or at least find others who have the same problem as you have.

Today's blog has been a little different but sometimes we poor geeks need a little encouragement and a bit of a pep-talk. Next blog I hope to talk about that much loved and too often feared word... Linux!