Sketch Guy

I made a Genius Bar appointment to see if they could tell me what the problem is with the trackpad in our MacBook Pro. Kim is the one who uses it most, but she'll get an unresponsive trackpad for maybe 5—15 seconds at a time, maybe a few times an evening. The keyboard still works during these times. People on the Apple discussions board seem to think it's the little ribbon cable that plugs into the track pad, which is directly beneath the battery, and the battery can push on it and cause the connector to not make contact. I dunno. Sounds iffy. That's a pretty tight little connector.

The Genius mainly checked lots of system prefs for 15 or 20 minutes, and suggested we run in a brand new user account to rule out 3rd party software. I'm sure it's not software. Plus, that won't rule out stuff that's installed in /Library, which I always do so it'll be available for all users. I have a feeling it was a big ol' wasted trip to Ridgedale. Not to excited about my first use of the Genius Bar. But yeah, trying to figure out an inconsistent problem that you can't duplicate at will can be a bitch that's best left to methodical methods. Still, it's a hardware problem, sure as snot.

On the way out, in the food court that leads out to the south–east parking lot, there was an old guy—maybe in his 80's—sitting there with a small sketch pad, sketching some guy in either pastels or colored pencils. I thought that was really cool. Then as I drove home I started wishing I would've stopped and talked to him. Does he do that to get out of the house and keep is art alive? Is he lonely? Gives him something to do while the wife shops?

Update: Running with a virgin account still showed the problem, like I knew it would.