I want my mac back. So much.

I'm sitting here with my tablet pc and my giant superpowered dell laptop, and I'm yearning for my Mac. It's come to my attention over the last few days that I've been dropping tasks, forgetting to do things that I should do, losing track of appointments... so I want iCal, and StickyBrain. Alas, my mac is currently in a box waiting for DHL to pick it up to send it back to Apple to be repaired, again.

And I'm really tired of not having the perfect html authoring tool. I just want to make something that looks decent and maybe has a few images. Dreamweaver is total overkill. Emacs is a little bit less WYSIWYG than I'd like. I've been using TopStyle which is also overkill; it's a CSS/XHTML/HTML editor, but it gives good previews and decent text editing. I'm very excited to use iWork... but I need my mac. Sigh.

No love.

Re-running the installer didn't work.
I called tech support. We ran disk utility, and the disk reported that it was fine. Then we did erase and install, but that failed too. Now it's blinking at me... the "I can't find a system disk" blink.

...and I'm on hold with tech support again.

In other news, Josh is back!!! I'm planning to spend the incredibly blizzardy weekend holed up in the cave finishing the screen port and watching ROTK ee. Possibly at the same time -- Dmitri hasn't yet figured out how to watch movies on the cave screens, but we've got a big mac G5 (which works) and dolby 5.1 surround sound.

Maybe I'll even bring in my radiant heater so that I can stand to be in the cave, where it's a balmy 66 degrees most of the time. Mmm, radiant heater, cave, ROTK ee, Joshy, and warm chocolate chip cookies! If only I could bring the kittens in to the cave.

I'm still on hold with tech support. So far we've zapped the parameter ram (cmd-option-p-r) and done something else (boot with option held down) and booted to open firmware (cmd-option-o-f). Still no joy.

a bad day for apple

Damn it, Apple!
Damn it!
I WANT MY MAC TO WORK.
Today I decided to upgrade my powerbook to 10.3. I'd had it at 10.3.4 when I sent it away for service, but Apple rebuilt the machine with 10.2 installed. So I put in the Panther install disks, hit restart, say "okay" and "continue" and "I agree" a few times, then leave it alone. I check back in a while; it's at "Performing Base Install, 29 minutes remaining." Then I take a nap. A two hour nap. When I get back, it's still at "Performing Base Install, 29 minutes remaining." I stare at it in dismay for a while, then give in and hit the power button.
It restarts, ejects the Panther disk, and gives me the "where's the startup disk" icon.
I hit the power button again, and this time I hold down the C key, to get it to boot from cd-rom. It boots to the installer again. I say okay/I agree/continue a few times, then leave it alone while I have a complete and useful conversation with a health insurance customer service representative. When I come back to the mac, it says "Installation was not successful. Please try again."
So I hit restart. It ejects the Panther CD, then goes into an all-too-familiar state: light gray background, dark gray apple logo, spinning gray "working" icon. For a long time.
I pushed the cd back in, waited, then hit the power button. Nothing. I then held down the power button for several seconds, to force it to shut down. And now I'm going to restart and try to install panther again. I'm pretty sure I will spend a few hours this evening on the phone with Apple tech support, though.

It's a bad day for Apple when a call with a health insurance customer service rep is both briefer and less irritating than an OS upgrade.

a beautiful morning in bed with my mac

This is just silly amounts of niceness. I went to sleep at bedtime watching 24 season 3 on my powerbook on my bedside table, after a snack of nutella and cream cheese on graham crackers. I woke up at 6 am and watched another hour of 24... then I found myself downloading software for my mac. I gave in to the urges, and I've spent the last hour just downloading and installing new software -- from bed!

It's so much easier to download and install software on the mac. I hope I can find the dvd with my huge backup. Of course I have other backups, but the easiest would be to just get it all off my one dvd backup. And I have to rip all my music again -- but this is sort of good, because last time I ripped as if I had infinite disk space. 30 gb is not infinite disk space.

I also can't exactly find my 5 gb firewire drive. This is a problem with shrinking peripherals.

Now... another little nap before I wake up, I think. Yummy.

ahhhh.... my mac is back

...ahhh....

my mac is back.

feels so good. to my right is a monster of a dell lapsquisher. to my left is a rather tasty toshiba tablet, with a gig of RAM. But right in front of me is my mac, my powerbook.



I think I will take my tablet to work... and leave it there!

If I need to code at home -- as I so often do -- I'll use my dell monster.

And my mac will be my cuddly computer. My couch computer. My communication computer.

Nothing has to drive me crazy in here.