A Rant - can be skipped if allergic to overlong moans

RANT WARNING: the following has little to do with the holiday, but a good rant is like a good sneeze, very frustrating till you can give it all you’ve got.  Getting it all down on paper will certainly make me feel a lot better, but you’re welcome to skip to the next post if you get fed up.

It’s amazing what you can learn about something when you sleep right next to it.  My laptop is one of the iconic white MacBooks, the one that seems to appear somewhere in nearly every film made since the late noughties.  It’s an early 2009 one so I’ve had it around 6 years.

It has a cute little white light on the front which glows when the computer is “asleep” cycling from full on to almost off every 5 seconds and a light on the computer end of the charging cable which changes from orange to green when fully charged.  What I didn’t know, even after all these years, until last night, is that there are also 5 green lights on the bottom of the computer which are meant to indicate the state of charge of the battery.  When the laptop is used without a charger, one can determine the state of the battery by pressing a little button on the bottom of the computer.  If it’s fully charged then all 5 will light up, if almost fully discharged then only one will glow.  When charging, the lights will illuminate one at a time till fully charged, the current state of charge being indicated by the relevant light flashing.

So what’s the problem with all this (apart from the obvious which is just what is the purpose of these fancy lights on the underside of the computer when you can just turn it on and it’ll tell you exactly what state the battery is in without having to turn it upside down and press a fiddly little button only to get a rough indication of the charge – rant within a rant – might have got a bit carried away there)? 

Well, last night I put the computer on the table next to my bed after finishing the blog and plugged it in the charge overnight.  Switching off the bedside light revealed what can best be described by a fairground’s worth of coloured lights, some static some dancing all across the room.  Now if it’s not completely dark I cannot get to sleep, and so the situation had to resolved.

OK, the pulsing white light on the front and the orange light on the charger cable were a bit annoying, but by shifting my pillow around a bit I could mostly shield those from my eyes, but what I couldn’t fathom was where the rest of the light was coming from.  I hadn’t realised that the computer was a bit wider than the bedside table and the pesky battery lights on the underside were illuminating the front of the table and most of the floor in front of it.

Turning the light on wouldn’t help as although those leds can be like searchlights in the dark they are barely visible once another light source is turned on.  Only after about twenty minutes of using my hand to cast shadows and follow them back did I discover them lurking underneath.  The cure was easy, pull the plug and finish off the charge tomorrow.

However, the story doesn’t end there  (I don’t want to hear any complaints about the length of this rant it’s certainly doing me good – you can always skip to the next post).  

Settling back down in bed feeling a little smug that I’d dealt with the problem in proper scientific way, ie indentified the problem, taken observations, formulated a hypothesis, modified the hypothesis based on further observations and finally come up with a solution which proved the hypothesis, I noticed that that it was still not fully dark in the room.  Indeed as my eyes became accustomed to the dark (that’s relatively speaking) it was clear that there was another unidentified immensely bright (or so it seemed at that time) light source in the room.  At this point, I should have just ignored this, but there was also a noise which sounded like angry tweebles chuntering away at each other, which kept coming and going.

Anyway to cut a long story down a bit (but not short), both the light and noise problems were coming from the air con unit in our room.  The light issue was caused by four different coloured leds built into the unit which couldn’t really be seen from floor level but which radiated out across the ceiling. 

The noise issue was down to the fan, the speed of which varies up and down in order to try and maintain an even temperature.  It seems that at a certain speed it becomes slightly unbalanced, causing a slight vibration which then wakes up the tweebles, who being unhappy at this then chunter away to themselves till the speed returns the fan to stable motion at which time they shut up and go back to sleep.  I should point out that tweeble chunter sounds just like there is something rattling inside a tin can.

Neither problem could be fixed until the morning as I would have had to turn on the light which would then wake Eunice, whose chuntering, I can assure you, is much worse than tweeble chunter.

It was no good trying to ignore the noise and the searchlights illuminating the room, I just had to hang on till exhaustion finally took hold and I slipped off into an uneasy sleep.

Come morning I found the remote for the air con unit.  None of the buttons seemed to help either problem – either I was pressing the wrong ones, or the remote wasn’t working properly.  The problem was finally resolved by standing on a chair, removing a cover on the unit to reveal a set of push buttons, with which, by trial and error, I managed to turn it off completely – and that’s how it’s going to have to stay for the rest of the holiday.

Hopefully tonight will be dark and quiet and sleep will come easy and they’ll be no need for another rant tomorrow.

And after getting that lot off my chest I feel a whole lot better.  The blog may be a bit late after this, but it will be cheerful.  Thanks to those who stayed with me through all this.  To those that didn’t, you’ll never know what you missed.

RANT OVER