Quiet For a While

I was going to post on Friday that there would be no posts for the long weekend. I'll be away at the beach as usual over July 4th and won't be back till Wed night. But now I can say even sooner there will be fewer posts. My mac's hard disk died a sudden death. Yep it happens to macs too. I have what should be a complete backup on an external drive from about a month ago. Not so bad as I don't really have anything critical. Since all my mail is kept on gmail that's ok, that system works out nicely.

I'll say it, but you won't really listen to me. Make sure you have backups and keep them current. Apparently this concept only sinks in after you've had a disaster yourself. Maybe Time Machine in Leopard will fix that.

I have two things to add. When my machine just hung today it was about 4pm. I tried a few things to bring it back and called a friend. Didn't make much progress. I tried making an appointment at the local Apple Store Genius Bar but it was booked. I managed to boot off of the Tiger DVD. I called Apple support and while I don't have Apple Care they took my call with only a couple of minutes wait and for free walked me through checking with Disk Utility and seeing the hard disk wasn't listed. That meant it needed someone to look at it so he made at appointment for me at the Genius Bar at 5:15pm. I don't know if he had special rights or an opening occurred but I got in the car and went over. The genius looked and yep it was dead. I ended up ordering the replacement drive through them, it was expensive but convenient and they had it in stock. They'll install it and try getting any data off of the old drive but that seems doubtful. By 6pm I was home. In just two hours I had called in support, dropped it off and had a plan to have it back to me. That's all without Apple Care on a 2+ year old machine. I think that's very nice. Apple is really making good use of their stores.

The second thing is that not having the PowerBook is kinda traumatic. I've been using it all the time as you can probably tell. But it's not quite as bad as when my series 1 TiVo died five years ago. On that one I had to send it to Sony to be repaired but lucked out to find it needed to go to Needham, MA which is about 20 mins from here. I dropped it off and even convinced them to fix it while I waited. I had it back up and running by the time I was back from work that day. Still the idea of TiVo dying was bad. I think it's probably less for the mac since I have a reasonable backup and I was planning on not bringing it with me on my trip anyway.

A last thing, I'm writing this post using bloggers web interface in Firefox on my PC. It's the first time the PC has been on in a few months. It's really not nearly as nice as using MarsEdit on the mac. But if I didn't have another computer and was completely cut off (and not by my own choice) I'd be pretty bummed.