Battery Woes 2….The Empire Strikes Back

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BATTERY WOES 2….THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK….I know you’re all waiting on pins and needles to get the skinny on my trip to the Apple Genius Bar, so here’s how it went. My appointment was scheduled for 3:20. At 3:20 they called my name. I told the tech my story, he nodded, plugged a doodad into my USB port and booted my MacBook. After a few seconds it came up with a special screen that said:

BATTERY STATUS: BAD

There was a bunch of other detail on the screen, but basically, it just confirmed that my battery was bad. And for what it’s worth, the tech says we were all wrong: there’s no harm in letting the battery discharge completely, and no harm in letting it sit around for a couple of months. It is a good idea to let it discharge to zero and then charge completely once a month or so, but that’s just to keep the battery calibrated. And it’s also a good idea to discharge it to 50% and turn the machine off if you think you’re not going to use it for five or six months. But that wasn’t my problem. I just had a bad battery. So he replaced it, and at about 3:30 I was on my way.

So: all whining about the battery aside, I have to say that this was just about the most painless tech support experience I’ve ever had. Kudos to Apple.

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AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

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Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

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