Ain’t it fascinating how your life can be completely derailed by a few days of computer downtime (and an impending new job, and a birthday party, and Mario Kart)?

My MacBook Pro’s checkerboard-display crashing problem, which first hit back in January, suddenly reappeared about two and a half weeks ago. After several hours of persistence, I finally got the computer to boot again.

All that time, I was not writing.

It crashed then once or twice more during the week, and through persistence I goaded it back, limping along.

This time, the problem seemed worse than it had in January. I felt it was about time to take it in for service. And then it stopped booting at all. I couldn’t get the computer to come back. But I didn’t know how I was going to afford the repair bill.

On top of that, my daughter C’s MacBook, which I use as a backup, it was also out of service. I had been running a data-recovery program on it for months, trying to get every last bit of data I could off of its failing hard drive. Again, I didn’t know where I was going to find the money for a replacement hard drive. But I knew I needed to work something out, somehow.

Right now, I can’t use my MacBook Pro. I’m using C’s computer to write this blog post.

The photo shows what the display corruption looks like while booting. After that, I get the white screen of death.

Now, my laptop may come back, because it eventually came back the two times it did this last week.

Frankly, it’s a little annoying.

What happens is, I’ll be doing something that stresses some part of the machine’s capabilities… but not always the same part. This time, I was watching a video and fast-playing through the boring bit, possibly stressing the video bandwidth. Last time, I was trying to start an application when the thing was already too busy, thus stressing CPU and disk bandwidth. The time before that… I don’t remember. In each case, the display suddenly corrupted, once in a diagonal banding pattern as you see in the photo, the other times with much worse corruption. Simultaneously, the computer crashed, hard.

Maybe my computer’s rebelling, because it’s become sentient, like the computers in Star Trek.