I’m reporting from Union Island in the southern part of St. Vincent and the Grenadines. We came here to get Internet so we could check E-mails and make some phone calls. We had some issues back home which needed our attention, and the big problems are with our onboard computers.
Our computer woes started before Christmas. My main laptop – a MacBook Pro – lost the LCD backlight to its screen. Everything else worked fine for 10 days or so, but then it suddenly wouldn’t wake up from sleep mode properly. I got it to wake up once, but it only stayed on for a short while. All efforts to get it going again have failed. So, the conclusion is a hardware problem. I have a new laptop on order. But, it will probably be a week or so before it gets down here. Then I’ll be able to send this one to Apple for service.
Meanwhile, I decided to use our other navigation computer – which is actually a Mac Mini used with a monitor in the nav station. I was going to install the software I use to process 360 panoramas from the backups of the MacBook Pro. Unfortunately, I had only used this computer with the Windows boot camp because it was only used for our navigation software. The monitor we use is an old low resolution LCD screen. When I attempted to boot into OS X, the screen won’t accept the resolution the Mini is set to. It took a while, but with help from my friend Andy during the last hour, we finally managed to get the resolution reset. Whew! For a while there we were down to one computer. It’s kind of comical in a way. I figured three computers with 5 OSes would give me plenty of redundancy in case a computer went bad. Sheesh!
