For anyone interested, I finally got my refurbished MacBook Pro back from the Apple Store yesterday.  I had a few issues after bringing it home, but everything seems to be right with the world now.  Soon I will post a diagram of my new home network and how my new baby fits in.  In the meantime here is a list of my issues and how they were resolved:

•  The original problem with the machine had to do with the battery and hard drive.  All they did according to the receipt was replace these two components.  That caused the machine to crash on startup 4 times out of 5.  The bad outcome here – I originally thought I lucked out by getting a 250GB HD instead of the 120GB HD I was promised.  Would have been great if the HD wasn’t hosed.
• When I got the machine from the store and started it up at my office, there was an admin user configured on the machine, and I didn’t have the password.  The machine had nothing on the HD when I gave it to them (it crashed in the middle of a fresh OS install).  They told me over the phone that they have a tool to clean this up (looks like a shell script called “missingkitty”), but they forgot to run it.  Without the admin password, I couldn’t run the script, and I didn’t feel like sitting in the apple store for another 45 minutes while I waited for someone to help me.  So I reinstalled the OS from the included disks.
• That night, I tried to use the MacBook for my kids to watch their bedtime ritual – the last 5 minutes of “Froggy Movie” (aka Leap Frog’s “Letter Factory” – which I highly recommend for the little ones), but after a few seconds the picture froze while the sound moved on, then everything went black on the DVD playback.  Luckily this seems to have been resolved by upgrading the OS to 10.5.2
• Totally unrelated note – I have had a weird issue recently with my G4/533 that I have now relegated to the role of file and print server.  I wanted to change the name of the system HD to Fileserve, but for some reason I couldn’t.  I thought it might have to do with the fact that I access it through VNC only (it’s now a headless machine), so I hooked my monitor up to it while I was configuring the MacBook, but I still couldn’t change the name of the HD.  I then learned the power of “Repair Permissions” in the Disk Utility app.  Nice.

That’s all I am saying about the new machine for now.  I am now making a list of the programs I need to install to get where I want.  Here’s the list – if anyone has suggestions for additional programs or substitutions, let me know.

• tinyfugue (for text based games)
• BBEdit (text editor)
• Games > Adventure
• Csound (I wrote some tone generating shell scripts for Csound)
• Cyberduck (FTP client)
• Chicken of the VNC (for accessing the fileserver)
• Games > Nethack
• wget
• lynx
• Lilypond (command line music engraving)
• Games > micropolis
• Refresh
• Smultron (text editor in case I don’t buy the upgrade to BBEdit)
• Mac the Ripper
• Handbrake