I Didn't Know What I Had Until It Was Gone

You never realize just how dependent you get on something until it is taken away. I am a power user of my mouse's scroll wheel and it really cramped my surfing and working style when the wheel (or ball to be more precise since it can move in any direction) decided to no longer enable me to scroll down.

Luckily the fix was pretty straight forward. Moisten a paper towel or cloth, rub the ball and see if that fixes it up again. If not then turn it over and repeat with some more vigorous rubbing action.

And badda-bing, we're scrolling to the bottom of pages lickety split again. Now if I could only get a longer screwdriver to tear apart an iMac with a dead power supply (hopefully its the power supply and not the hard drive which has a bunch of information the teacher still needs).

Oh yeah, my computer lab is a rather nice and warm (comparitively) fifty-nine degrees already this morning. At this rate I'll be able to take off my heavy fleece pullover just before the end of the day.

Mac Support Weirdness

First off, the new Imacs? They are freaking beautiful, elegant and kind of sexy for a computer. I'm not sure how I'd like keyboard over the long term but damn, the monitors are sweet, the little remote control is very nice and they are just a pretty excellent package all the way around.

Secondly, what the fuck is Voiceover? One of the machines in the lab had gotten inadvertently switched on with it and it was the most annoying, godawful thing ever. The same crappy synthesized voices we had back in the 80's? Awful. And annoying.

One thing I am learning as I take my first tentative steps into the world of a professional tech support monkey, is that people and kids in particular are really good at screwing up computers in ways I never would have thought possible.

So far though, I'm having a good time!

Blind Blogging

So it has been made apparent that I am one of the only ones who cannot actually get to my blog. Thanks for the comments, by the way.

Which means, I can post to my blog but I can't go and read it. And, since the Grammar Police stopped by, I have to be extra careful about spelling stuff wrong or using the incorrect tense (or is that tents?).

I expect that whatever snafu is keeping from gazing upon the glory that is my blog will sort itself out and all will return back to what passes for normal. But it is annoying and makes me want to go punch someone.

My information recovery efforts continue though and that is making things a little better. I imported the first six months of photos from 2007 last night and then uploaded whatever archived images were on my camera memory cards. I still lost a lot of photos that I would just as soon not have lost but I've gotten the vast majority of it back.

Now the fun is trying to get preferences back to where I had them, FireFox extensions back, screensavers and the like.

And I have nothing but fear that my replacement hard drive in the lap top is going to start sputtering and die on me as well. If I were to take a vote, I'd definitely give a no-confidence vote for the laptop.

On the plus side, since my old hard drive is a skinny brick now, I'm going to take it out of the external enclosure, go into the back yard and smash it to bits. That might make me feel a little better even if the finality of destroying it means all of that data is well and truly gone forever. As long as it sits on my desk, I can hold out hope that it will spontaneously repair itself and function properly again.

But I am still not holding my breath.

Brace Yourselves, We're Going In

Last night, just before bed (of course), my laptop started acting funny and making noises that someone might describe as funny but I'd describe as expensive. And then I started to get cascading application crashes, total hang ups and ten to fifteen minute reboot times.

After futzing with it for a while and getting it to limp back to something resembling a working condition, I went to bed.

And then ended up spending the better part of the day trying to bring the sucker back to life. Which did wonders for my mood.

Oh yeah, this is the same laptop that I just dropped $500 on five weeks ago to replace a frying video card.

Anyway, after much wranglgin, swearing and diagnostic work I arrived at the diagnosis, a dying hard drive. Wonder-fucking-ful!

Luckily I happen to have several spare laptop hard drives around and one 80 gig that is slated for installation shortly. Then I get to see if I can pull my music and photos off the old drive before I smash the sum-bitch into a thousand pieces. I did back up my photos a couple of weeks ago so I'm not overly worried about losing too much. But it is a colossal pain in the ass and I'm not looking forward to breaking the case open. But it has to be done and I'm sure as hell not paying some geek monkey to do it for me.

'Specially when there are these sweet and complete installation guides online, with photos! Now I just need to be extra careful with the connector ribbon cable and I'll be back on the speed(ier) nachine before bedtime. Or I'll have a shiny Apple-branded brick.

BTW, thank fortune for my old war horse Pismo that just keeps chugging along. It ain't fast but it works and that's good enough for now.

[Update: We have arrived on the other side, more or less unscathed. The annoyances now are that my bookmarks are locked up in a dying hard drive on my desk. That and the last few weeks of photos and all of my music from the last year or so (much of the rest of it has been backed up (coincidentally to the hard drive I just installed). Now comes the additional fun of updating apps, losing all of my photo albums and iTunes playlists and lots of other stuff that I won't remember until I need it again. This sucks but at least I've got my machine sort of back.]