I had Memorial Day off from work, so I went to see Terminator: Salvation with damiondead . The reviews that I'd read beforehand were pretty much correct: lots of special effects, lots of action, very little plot. The one high point in the movie for me was the appearance of a computer-generated Ah-nuld, who, ironically, seemed to be capable of the same emotional range as the real one.

Before heading to the movie, damiondead dropped off his iMac at the SF Apple store. He's apparently been having a lot of strange problems with it which the "geniuses" at the other Apple stores have been unable to fix. (The last time they apparently returned the machine with a diagnostic routine of some kind still installed on it.) The problems he describes (the machine sometimes freezes after an iPod is plugged into a USB port, sometimes it freezes during heavy graphics activity (i.e. playing WoW), sometimes audio will stutter and then it will freeze) all sound like classic Heisenbugs. Given the non-deterministic nature of the failures, I'm not inclined to think it's a software problem, especially since he upgraded the OS to 10.5.7 just recently, and that didn't help. The RAM has been replaced, but the problems occured both before and after the RAM upgrade, so faulty RAM itself is probably not the issue either. Trying to think of potential sources of trouble, I came up with the following:

- Machines fear Damion (though, clearly, they don't fear him enough)
- Cat fur-induced thermal problems
- Dante feeding the computer a ham sandwich while Damion's back was turned
- A transient system board fault (bad solder joint?)
- Some bizarre form of electromagnetic interference
- A problem with the power supply in the computer
- A problem with the electrical system at Casa Dammitt itself
- Canada

Normally I'd be totally in favor of just blaming Canada, but that won't help Damion, and I kinda want to. Evidence suggests that the last batch of Apple geniuses couldn't find anything wrong with the machine, though that could be because they're all a bunch of hipster douchebags. But if it really didn't fail for them, and if the tests they ran were really worth a damn, then that means the problem is situational. I'm really tempted to say that the problem is not the computer, but something at Casa Dammitt itself. The only trouble with that theory is that there's a bunch of other electronic doodads there which work fine (including Tina's computer, which is also a Mac).

I guess it is possible for this particular machine to be especially picky about input voltage variations or line noise. Finding a way to prove this though is the tricky part. One possible test would be for Damion to bring the machine into work and run it there for a while, though a) I'm not sure how picky his boss(es) would be about him bringing a non-work system into the office and b) I get the feeling that these days the only thing he wants to bring to work with him is a club with a spike in it. I guess we'll have to see what the geniuses from the SF Apple store have to say.