Day three in Halifax; we start the morning down by the water with the macchiato special at Two If By Sea in the Historic Properties.

My friend Christina did me the great favour of facilitating a tour of the Dawson Print Shop at NSCAD tonight.

There’s a regular Monday night Letterpress Gang in the shop; I must return another Monday to set and print.

The highlight of the tour was a rummage around the basement type storage rooms: Oh, the type!

I was all wrong about the Genius Bar.

I was never quite sure what you would do there, but I imagined it had something to so with asking questions about shortcut keys or backup strategies or the right gardening software. Like a public library reference desk, but limited to question about Apple hardware and software.

I’n sure some of that is true, but today I learned that the Genius Bar can also diagnose – and possibly fix – your Mac.

Oliver’s mid-2012 MacBook Air developed a sound issue last week: no sound through the speakers, no sound through the headphone port, no sound input or output devices showing up in the settings.

Oliver was able to patiently hold on, silently, until our trip to Halifax today when we had an appointment at the Genius Bar at the Apple Store in Halifax (easy to make online).

We showed up at our appointed time, were ushered to the bar — it really is a bar — and our “genius” introduced himself. He was a Joey Jeremiah look alike and he knew why we were there from the form I filled out when I made the appointment, so he was primed and ready.

He had Oliver login to his Mac and shut it down, then plugged in a USB Ethernet adapter and booted up to a diagnostic tool that accurately deduced that it was a hardware issue. He excused himself for a moment, went into “the back,” and emerged 10 minutes later with a working computer: turns out that the cable that connects the sound system to the computer had become loose. He cautioned Oliver to try to avoid giving the upper-left corner of the computer — the section around the power socket — a knock to mitigate against this happened again.

We were in and out in 20 minutes. No charge.

The entire experience was handled quickly, professionally and with good humour.

So that’s what they do at the Genius Bar.

All it took was 15 minutes at the Genius Bar to get the sound working on Oliver’s MacBook Air (it was simply a loose connection inside). No charge.

Is there a better room to watch movies in than The Oxford in Halifax? One of the last surviving un-multiplexed theatres. Here to see The Lady in the Van.

The proper thing to do on the way to Halifax, although it flies directly in the face of my no doubling back rule, is to stop for lunch in Sackville at the Black Duck.

Catherine and her friend BJ are working on an epic piece together.

Those were the days.

A small item on the front page of The Guardian from March 16, 1916 concerning the application for divorce of Major Hamilton Gault being denied by the Senate.

Follow this thread and you end up learning about a fascinating person; even just the story of the divorce – which he eventually secured – is compelling.

Postscript: Gault’s first wife, Marguerite Claire Stephens, the other party to this application for divorce, went on to remarry; her second marriage was to Count Luigino Falchi, an “Italian war ace.”

That marriage too ended in divorce, and after Stephens’ death her estate was disputed, as reported in the September 29, 1931 edition of the Montreal Gazette. 

The case, wherein Stephens’ ex-husband Falchi sued the executor of Stephens’ estate for $370,000 based on his assertion that, under Italian law, he was entitled to this after their divorce; Stephens’ estate responded that, because Stephens was never legally divorced from Gault, her marriage to Falchi was invalid, and therefore he was not entitled to compensation. The case was successful, and the estate was ordered to compensate Falchi.

Stephens’ executor appealed to the Supreme Court of Canada which dismissed the appear in June of 1938 with costs, ruling that the Falchi-Stephens marriage was legal.