So I'm putzing around on my laptop this morning when I notice a small dot on my monitor; as I'm insanely OCD about such things, I quickly grab my bottle of Monster Screen Clean and start attempting to wipe it away. It stays there, unmoving.

I raise an eyebrow, questioning what the hell is going on. I mean, this computer is two months old, for crying out loud... it couldn't have a dead pixel already, could it?

Yeah, it appears it could.

On the plus side, I have a service plan on this guy, so I can send it out to get the screen repaired. Down side, naturally, is that it'll take anywhere from 2-4 weeks for me to get this stupid thing back. I suppose I could argue that it's been two freakin' months and that an exchange is in order, but I really, really don't wanna have to replace the hard drive in one of these things again.

I swear, when I think I can't have worse luck with electronics, something else proves that my optimism is unwarranted.

So, last night, after working a fairly long, mostly crappy day, I come home to sit down and trip over something on the floor, knocking over a cup of coffee that had been sitting right next to my MacBook Pro.

Yeah, I was in an even better mood after that, let me tell you.

On the plus side, it seems that everything is working fine, save for the right speaker which now crackles when once it played crisp and clean like freshly fallen snow, or some other cliched simile. So, thanks to my accidental damage performance service plan from Best Buy, my computer will be going out to get repaired for anything between two to four weeks. Le sigh.

I know I've been rather odd about updates here lately, what with working and whatnot, but I wanted to give you all a heads up that I'm not just being lazy, it's the universe conspiring against me or another equally absurd paranoid sentiment. I'll bring out some updates on my phone, and maybe use one of the other four computers we have in the house (but require 72% more movement to get to than my laptop ever did), but we'll see how that works out.

And, for all of you curious as to how I reacted to this MacBook Catastrophe, feel free to click here to see an actual photo of it. Hopefully the pain and anguish is clearly expressed.

UPDATE: Actually, you can't hear any crackling in the speakers unless if you're playing a song on a very high volume and the note is somewhere in the ionosphere, so I do believe I'll be holding off on this for a while. However, one point I don't think I made clearly is how impressed I am that the computer is working at all after this spillage. If all that happened was that a speaker isn't as awesome as it once was (and it's pretty damn close), that's incredible.

I was thinking of naming this post "How To Slowly Destroy Your Grasp On Reality," but I thought it'd be a bit melodramatic.

Let me start off by saying that I'm not a stranger to taking apart laptops, especially of the Apple variety; I can take a hard drive out of an iBook G4 (which has about 150 steps just to remove the case to get to the innards) with little problem. And, given how easy it is to install a hard drive in a normal MacBook (1. Take out battery, 2. Remove metal plate that is held by three screws, 3. Take out the hard drive using convenient plastic tab, 4. Take old hard drive out of tray, and put new one in, 5. Reverse steps, 6. Done), I thought maybe, maybe, this would be not so bad.

Yeah. Not so much.

It's not that it's difficult to do, mind you... the entire job takes removing about 25 screws from start to finish, compared to the 8000 screws that the iBook seems to present you with. And removing the drive isn't so bad, save for the annoying glue that holds the infrared port for the Apple Remote in place on top of the drive. What is a pain, and what drove me absolutely nuts, was the top casing.

See, you gotta pry around the edges of the MacBook Pro to lift the thing out, which isn't really all that difficult of a task until you get to the front of the computer, which seems to be held down by either duct tape or God. Rocking the piece back and forth was the recommended way pry it loose according to iFixIt.com, but all that resulted in was some bending of the top, which wasn't major enough to bother anyone but me.

So, if you're thinking your gonna want to upgrade the hard drive in your MacBook Pro, you might wanna look at having Apple do it as a custom order at their store, since it's a bit of a headache. Speaking of headaches, I'm suffering through a pretty intense one at the moment, so it's nap time.