The Sun BabelFish Blog
Don't panic !
laptop break down
As I arrived in Lucca on the night of Wednesday 17 October (a little over a week ago), my 17" Powerbook suddenly became very very slow. I tried restarting it but it then refused to boot: it just got stuck on a blank screen without even showing the initial Apple logo. Without any of my contact information, remembering that I had made a backup of all my hard drive on a disk that was now in France, but encrypted that image with a new password that I could no longer remember but that I had written down on the now broken laptop, remembering that I had not yet checked in my previous week's work into CVS, I felt both at a loss and quite stupid.
Most hotels were booked, so I tried out the amazingly elegant youth hostel. That is when I discovered the magical beauty of Lucca and wondered if my laptop had not decided to die out of jealousy.
The next morning I went to an Apple shop, but they were reluctantly helpful, especially finding out that the computer was under warranty, and that I had to fly to Prague on Tuesday. I left them the laptop, and picked it up unchanged on Monday, after a weekend of heavy work with Danny Ayers and Reto on Atom-OWL.
This Wednesday arriving in Prague I found a very good Apple shop where it was easier to get things done, as I had more time in front of me. I ended up buying a new 120GB drive to replace the 2 year old and well worn 80GB one (I'll use the replacement 80GB drive from Apple as a backup store when I get it) as I was running out of space anyway, and can see the disk filling up with all the pictures I am taking. I picked up my repaired laptop yesterday, and succeeded over the course of today in getting all my work, all my photos and some of my music copied over very slowly to the new drive before it gave up its soul with a worrying clink sound. Thus I was left a little over a week without access to my work environment.
Of course "The Network is the Computer" and so this did not stop me getting work done via a remote shell from Lucca or using the very handy Sun Rays in Prague. But working with Italian or Czech keyboards, in a slightly unfamiliar environment can be quite a drag. So I am really happy to have my environment back again.
Posted at 05:41PM Oct 22, 2005 [permalink/trackback] by Henry Story in travel | Comments[0]
