clock … watching time, the only true currency

Update, March 17th The sleep problem reoccured, and now it’s gotten worse: the computer won’t start up. Heading back to the Genius Bar tonight.

I suppose the good news is that maybe after all this is solved, I can turn on Growl again, since it’s not longer clear that was the (only) problem.

It took a genius to figure out that Growl, the notification system for Mac OS X, was what caused the iMac G5 (PowerPC) to stop waking from sleep. I got totally fed up with unplugging the computer and restarting just to use the computer after two days, and made an appointment online to bring it to the genius.

Seriously, the genius was Ben at the Genius Bar at the Apple Store near Union Square in San Francisco. He repeated the problem which caused me to bring the computer in this evening (phew). Then he did a bunch of hardware checks without finding anything.

So, we started from another system, and the problem went away. Therefore, a software problem. First place we looked (at his suggestion) was in the Startup Items, since he’d seen that I had Quicksilver installed. He knew that utility does some low-level stuff, although he didn’t think that was necessarily the problem. I saw the Growl preference pane in the list, disabled it first, and BAM, problem solved. (I’m quite happy Quicksilver was not too blame. THAT I could not give up.)

That Growl was the problem is (a) surprising and (b) too bad.

Surprising because I’ve had Growl installed here at home for at least two months, so I’m not sure why it would start to cause a problem this week.

Too bad because I like the notifications, even though I use this computer less than the MacBook at work, where Growl is, well, growling along happily. It’s version 0.76 of the Universal Binary. I haven’t looked around to see if this problem is common/reported, but making this post to help others who may fall afoul of the sleep gods.

I was slightly misled by the slightly burnt smell coming from the computer (when I was looking at it closely). Ben at the Apple Store thought it was just dust near the processor, which really does get hot. Seems to be right.

I’m just happy I can put the computer to sleep again. I’m headed there myself.