Yup, I got my PowerBook back today, earlier than expected. They replaced my logic board for the 3rd time — this time a new one, I am told (sometimes Apple will provide only refurbished parts to the repair centers). On my Customer Service Report I see this under Logic Board part no. 661-2537:

Serial No.
New: QT22502KLF8A
Old: QT225027LF8A

Cool, huh?

I picked up the PowerBook after work, at around 6:45pm. When I reached home, I showered, played with Justin a short while before his bed time (around 8pm), had dinner, and read the newspaper. Now, I have just finished migrating all my Eudora mailboxes/messages that I had in PC format to the Mac. I used a very handy external hard disk (2.5", bus-powered FireWire + USB 1.1/2.0) to get the mailbox files across. I had been using Eudora on my home and work PCs (running Windows 2000) while my PowerBook was in the repair center, since May 20th (10 days).

With Eudora, the text part of all messages are in a standard text format and all attachments are saved individually to a separate folder. Each "mailbox" (e.g. In, Out, Trash) is a separate text file and the only difference between the format on Macs and PCs is how each system (Mac or Windows) handles text — with only the carriage returns and line feeds (CR/LF) being different. On the Mac, I can convert between the Mac and PC text formats using the popular text editor, BBEdit, or in Mac OS 9 I used to use a program called "CRLF" (unfortunately, no longer available) that I could just drag and drop a bunch of files onto to do the conversion in sort of a batch mode. On the PC, I found a nice program called ChangeText (US$10 shareware) that does the same thing as CRLF. When converting the Eudora mailboxes from Mac to PC, I just did the text conversion and made sure each mailbox file ended in .MBX. When converting from PC to Mac, I did the conversion, removed the .MBX filename extension, and added back the Eudora mailbox "Type" (TEXT) and "Creator" (CSOm) codes using an OS X program called FileInfo (freeware). Attachments would be a problem because in the mailbox files, Eudora records down the absolute path to the attachment files and Macs and PCs handle paths differently (e.g. C:\Program Files\Qualcomm\Eudora\Attach vs. Macintosh HD:Users:derek:Documents:Eudora Folder:Attachments).

Whoa, time to go to sleep! G'night!

Excellent anti-smoking letter by Esther Morris of Mid-Levels as published today in the South China Morning Post "Talkback" column:

I write with reference to Sherry Lee's article "Hungry to stoke a smouldering issue" (May 9), according to which restaurant owner Richard Feldman objects to a total ban on smoking because it would deprive smokers of their "rights".

I would like to know which particular rights Mr Feldman is referring to.

Presumably he is talking about liberty, but can such liberty be justified at the expense of another person's right to well-being?

The universality of human rights requires that each person act with due regard for other persons' freedom and well-being as well as for their own. This implies there is a responsibility as well as a right. Smokers, who are in the minority, impose the effects of their habit on non-smokers, who are the majority. How can this be right?

Hong Kong desperately needs to improve its image with the rest of the world. Banning smoking in restaurants would be a step in the right direction.

ESTHER MORRIS, MID-LEVELS

Dr Margaret Cheng, in her "Doctor" column today in the South China Morning Post started out her article titled "Tobacco treaty" this way:

Remember those protest marches by waiters and bar staff against plans to ban smoking in restaurants and bars? It was going to ruin their business and put them all out of work, they said.

A year on, a lot of them have lost their jobs. But the ban on smoking had nothing to do with it. Air quality, or the fear that air quality is not good or safe enough, has had everything to do with it.

While Sars has managed to do what the smoking ban couldn't — all the evidence in other countries is that more people use restaurants and bars once smokers stop polluting them — Hong Kong has had a lot to do with moving the world towards a healthy smoke-free status.

How? Dr Judith Mackay (a former South China Morning Post health columnist) has worked tirelessly for nearly a decade to get the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC) — which aims at curbing tobacco-related deaths and diseases — passed by the World Health Organisation (WHO).

Of course, I am all for this! More info on the FCTC:

http://www.who.int/mediacentre/releases/2003/prwha1/en
http://tobacco.who.int

Big day for Hong Kong: WHO removes recommendation to avoid travel to Hong Kong.

http://www.who.int/mediacentre/releases/2003/prwha4/en/

An excerpt from yesterday's press release:

23 May 2003 | GENEVA -- Effective today, the World Health Organization (WHO) is removing its recommendation that people should postpone all but essential travel to Hong Kong Special Administrative Region and Guangdong province, China.

The recommendation to consider postponing all but essential travel to Hong Kong and Guangdong was issued on 2 April in order to minimize the international spread of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS). WHO is changing this recommendation as the situation in these areas has now improved significantly.

[...]

In Hong Kong, the three-day average number of new cases has remained below five over the last six days and the pattern of the outbreak shows a sustained decline since the peak of new cases in late March. The total number of people who are still infectious (all of whom are in hospital) has fallen below 60, although there are other former SARS patients who are still convalescing or being treated for other conditions in hospital. All new cases in the past 20 days have occurred in people who were already identified as contacts of a person with SARS and under active surveillance by the local health authorities. There have been no recent reports of internationally exported cases from Hong Kong.

And on top of this good news, today, for the first time since the reporting of daily SARS cases began, there have been NO new cases. Yesterday, 2 new cases had been reported.

Whoa, a whole month has gone by without me writing a single entry here! Why no updates in such a long time? Well, a bunch of factors, really. I have been lazy. I have been extremely busy in the office. I have been spending more time with little Justin. Here's one of the main reasons though: My main computer, a PowerBook G4/500, has been never been working right since I had the logic board replaced, the result of coffee I had spilt directly onto the keyboard.

I have had the logic board changed 2 times already and it looks like it'll be changed yet another time. With the first 2 replacement logic boards the problem was a relatively minor one — a push of certain keys would have the effect of 3 or 4 other keys being depressed. With the 3rd logic board, the problem is quite serious — the machine would totally freeze/lock-up anywhere from 4 to 20 times a day. The mouse pointer/curser would completely freeze or disappear. These freezes occured in a freshly-installed OS X (10.2.4), stock OS 9 (9.2.2), in Single-User command-line mode (booted with Command-S keys held down), booted from an OS 9 install CD and a Disk Warrior boot CD, and in many different applications (i.e. Eudora, Disk First Aid, Terminal, Internet Explorer). Another important point is that I had never experienced these sort of solid lock-ups since I started using OS X, almost a year ago. Of course, all of this pointed to a hardware, rather than software, problem. On a recent visit to an Apple authorized repair center (one visit out of over half a dozen in the past 2 months or so), the technician suggested the problem was my hard disk. Fed up with the constant freezes and visits back to the repair center, I immediately bought a new hard disk and had it installed. For 2 days, on Saturday and Sunday, the PowerBook worked without any freezes. On the following Monday, however, the freezes came back! I actually took over half an hour of video showing my PowerBook continuously freezing (freeze, power off, start up, disk check, freeze, power off, start up, disk check...) in an effort to convince the Apple repair center that the logic board was likely the problem. So now my PowerBook has been at the repair center for a week of thorough testing and I've been told that the logic board will likely be replaced again (for the 3rd time!) and that I'd probably be able to get the PowerBook back in another week or so, on around June 2nd. So I have spent a tremendous amount of time in the past month troubleshooting and continuously backing up my data. I'll be using my Windows 2000 PCs at home and work for another week.