and we're back... sort of

I may have to take my refurbished Mac back to the repair guy. While the computer, with its new brain, shows certain improvements, there are also certain very vexatious problems, all of which seem to be caused by the ancient Mac OS that the guy installed. I don't know why he went with such outdated software, but because of that, I'm stymied: I can't use iTunes to access my Cloud-saved movies and TV shows (so no "Burn Notice" tonight); I can't enact Apple Store software updates without encountering permission errors and other types of errors; I can't use my laptop as a WiFi hot spot without the WiFi crapping out on me because of a severely unstable connection. All of this is quite irritating. I can still watch YouTube, but there's a warning flag saying that YouTube will stop supporting this browser (i.e., the antiquated version of Google Chrome that automatically downloaded when I downloaded Chrome). Amazon Prime Video won't play at all on this browser. I urgently need to upgrade my OS, and based on some research I just did (I can still navigate the Web), it seems the version I need to upgrade to is called High Sierra (Mac OS 10.13.6). I'm currently on 10.8.5, a sleepy version of Mountain Lion.

So that's the Möbius conundrum: I need to download a better OS from the Mac App Store, but I can't access the App Store until I have a better operating system. In the meantime, I can still blog. At least for now. I get the feeling that a lot of heavy-duty blogging will have to continue to be done at work.

One cool thing is that my storage got amped up: the 2011-era MacBook Air came with only 64GB of storage in its SSD (solid-state drive). I now have almost 240GB of storage, which means I won't have to worry about storage-limit warnings for a long, long time.

Oh, yeah: there was a 10% surcharge tacked onto the repair cost because I had the audacity to use a credit card. The surcharge policy was written in large print on a sheet of A4 paper and taped to the side of the repair guy's work station, so at least he was being aboveboard about it. I privately grinned because my foreign credit card (a Chase Amazon Visa) causes Korean card readers to deduct an extra 5% from every transaction—not an extra 5% from what I have to pay, but 5% that goes to the credit-card company instead of to the merchant. The bike-shop guy whined about this back when I'd bought my bike. "Get a Korean card!" he groused while grinning, unable to hide his irritation. Anyway, a W165,000 price tag is still a reasonable price to pay for this sort of repair, so I'm not exercised about it.

More news when it happens.

UPDATE: I somehow managed to circumvent the App Store and download myself a free copy of Mac OS X Yosemite (10.10), which is the OS I'd been using before my Mac's brain died. It's installing right now as I type this update on my phone at 3:15 a.m., Friday morning. I hope this solves certain performance issues and allows me to make further updates.

UPDATE 2 (Friday, 5/8/20, 5:00 a.m.): Everything works again! Now, it's just a matter of reinstalling all the programs that got deleted in the brain transplant: MS Office, Skype, Clean My Mac X, Adobe Acrobat Full Suite, Adobe Photoshop Elements 14, and Norton Security. I'm still curious about updating my OS to High Sierra, which is a 2017-era operating system.