Portable gut check

Thursday 7 September 2006 - Filed under computers + mac + me

My Powerbook’s disk died yesterday around 1pm. Since then I’ve been thinking about how to get by without it. After taking far too long to realize it was beyond my troubleshooting ability, I took it to the UTC Apple store at 5 or so, and got an appointment for 7:45, then went for a drink. When I came back, the Apple store guy referred me to drivesavers – I’ll have to see what their estimate is when they call me back. For now, I assume I’ll have to pay whatever they ask – I was careful about backing up notes and papers to my iDisk and keeping important work files in repositories on other machines, but there is still a lot of stuff on that machine that I can’t replace, and my full-backup scheme was just inconvenient enough (and my target disk just small enough) that my full backup is pretty stale.

I can keep working for now on lab computers and my old home Mac – I’m pretty impressed with how much I can just transfer over to another mac and keep running – I can check all my mail (IMAP or GMail), read my NetNewsWire subscriptions (Newsgator Online), go through my bookmarks (iSync & .mac). Pretty impressive, even without any effort to stay flexible.

Here’s hoping I can be back on track soon – for now I’m only a Mac user at nights, and I’m going to miss a few things during the days, to be sure.

2006-09-07  »  mike