Nick standing on a hill in Rwanda

On Sunday, July 26th 2009 I am taking on the Nautica NYC Triathlon. It’s a 1500m swim (~1 mile) through the Hudson River, a 40k bike (~25 miles) up the West Side Highway, and a 10k run (~6.2 miles) through Central Park.

I’m racing to help the incredible children who live at the Agahozo-Shalom Youth Village in Rwanda. These kids are amazing and truly inspiring. They’ve been through so much already, but believe that if you see far, you will go far and are working to become the future leaders of their communities and their country.

Please help me offer hope to these amazing kids by making a contribution. Thank you!

My friend John just wrote about his trip to OUSA ‘09, the Origami USA Convention in NYC. Check out his post and the amazing models he and his colleagues have folded!

UPDATE: Oops, fixed the links.

Recently a battery completely failed in a two-year old black 2.16GHz MacBook that was covered under AppleCare. It worked fine one day, went completely dead the next. It wouldn’t charge and no LEDs would light up. When I brought it into the genius bar at my local Apple Store I learned something interesting about the way Apple treats batteries covered under warranty.

The first thing that the tech did was run a diagnostic application on the battery from a bootable iPod nano (pictured). The application graphed the gradual decay of the battery over time and the little black dot could fall into one of two buckets: defective or consumed (not the exact terms, but you get the idea). Luckily, the little black dot on my battery fell into the defective area and was replaced.

Since batteries are consumable parts (like tires on a car) Apple doesn’t cover them indefinitely — even if the machine is covered under its AppleCare Protection Plan (APP). Batteries that are consumed are considered past their normal lifespan and will not be replaced under warranty.

One of the telling things about this particular visit to the Apple Store was something the tech told me. He said that he would replace the battery with a new one because it has be “used correctly.” When I asked him to elaborate on what that meant, he told me that Apple’s notebook batteries last longest when they’re routinely charged and discharged.

My defective battery had 200+ discharge cycles on it which means that it had be charged and discharged that many times — in Apple’s eyes more is better. He wouldn’t give me a specific cutoff point but he said that when a customers comes in with sub-70 charge cycles over 2+ years they know that it’s probably been plugged into AC power most of the time — which is not how the battery is designed to work and can lead to premature failure.

He went on to say that the chemistry inside a rechargeable battery works best when it’s used — translation: charged and discharged — and that if it’s always plugged into AC power (and fully topped off) most of the battery isn’t being used and will gradually decay. The genius helping me claimed to have 700+ charge cycles on his three-year-old battery and said that it still gets three plus hours of run time as as result.

I guess the lesson here is to unplug your MacBook and let the battery run down before recharging it.

So, I looked to an app that would show me this and found one, coconutBattery. Here is what I saw (note: my battery is brand new):

My daughter with her collection of baby frogs. We’ll set them free later.

This is where we parked the boat for a beautiful fireworks display at Queens Landing, in the middle of Lake Norman.

There were hundreds of boats in all directions. Giovanni and Serafina were thrilled by the display, but Marco was afraid of the popping noise (as Sera put it) and Antonio got seasick and slept through the whole show :-(

So, yesterday I went to Volcano National Park in Rwanda and saw mountain gorillas. There are a bunch of gorilla families in the mountains and there are various routes to see them. We took the most difficult route, 2.5 hours climbing to an elevation of 10,300 feet. This was the premier gorilla trek in the park and since Rwanda is the premier country to see these gorillas in the world, we basically had the premier gorilla experience in the world. Wow. Video coming soon!

Pictures from today! Oh, and we’re having dinner with Jack Hanna .

Sent to you by Nick Cody via Google Reader: Addiction via xkcd.com on 6/14/09

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So, I brought it to the Apple Store and they replaced my phone, lickity split. The guy said that once you get that error, it’s basically time for a replacement. Fortunately, I was still under warranty. So cool. Now I had a brand new iPhone. It looked prettier, but more importantly I had a new battery. My old phone’s battery was starting to die out by the end of the day.

Anyway, not even a day goes by an the “No SIM card installed” error comes back. Moley. I went to the AT&T store near my office and asked to have the SIM card replaced. Sure enough, that did the job.

On my way home, I texted my wife and told her which train I was on. This was how it went:

Me: On the 7:19 Her: On the 7:19 Me: Yes, very funny. Her: Yes, very funny.

What the? Then I realized that when I asked for my SIM card, I gave them my wife’s phone number! This meant that her phone was disabled. Miraculously, I still had 10 minutes before my train left and the AT&T store was across from Penn Station. I got the SIM card fixed and was given the replacement for my wife’s iPhone (actually, t he one they gave me earlier in the day).

In the end, I got a new phone out of the deal. Score.