They’re all dead, Dave.
So in one fell swoop, I killed both of my computers over the course of one weekend.
The newer one, the MacBook Pro I got back in Canada while freelancing for some St. Louis IT Companies in February, is technically still in a coma at the Genius Bar in the new Pudong Apple Store.
I tried to eject my portable hard drive and it refused to complete the eject. It went into Rainbow Death Wheel mode and wouldn’t close or reboot or even shut down. I had to let the battery run out to force it to turn off. When the battery finally ran dry and shut down, it refused to wake up. We tried all the trouble shooting keyboard combinations to no avail. The lovely Lily Zhang at the Genius Bar wasn’t able to revive it either. I now have to wait ten days to find out what happened.
The older one, the 2006 clunky old batteryless grinder of a white MacBook that I got in Dubai, is thoroughly dead. This was not unexpected. The rainbow wheel of death interrupted my sentence and it never woke up from its force quit. All I got thereafter was the startup screen you can see above. It hurts.
So, technically, I am on a low tech diet for the next fortnight at least. I have nowhere to upload camera photos and no computer with bluetooth to take my phone photos. I’m writing this from work on my heavily Great Firewalled office computer. Almost everything I want to read is blocked. Facebook, Twitter, Word Press, Blogger and Typepad are blocked. You Tube is blocked. So far, this website is still available. I have yet to offend, I suppose.
How do I feel about all this?
Not as badly as I’d feared.
I do feel very disconcerted by the possibility that I didn’t back everything up on my newer computer. If so, my Myanmar and Yangshuo pictures may be lost. My Thunderbird-based emails (from the past several years, downloaded from my hotmail address) may be lost. There are some other odds and ends that I may or may not have remembered to back up, like music and videos, but they can be replaced.
As I said, however, I don’t feel as badly as I had feared. Part of me, surreally and unexpectedly, feels released. Part of me wants to just continue this trend and just say fuck it to everything- fuck the job, fuck my mp3 player and digital camera and all my other nerd toys, fuck my blog, fuck living abroad, fuck it all.
I want a farm and I want to raise goats and I want to learn to make awesome goat cheese like a master and I want to learn to brew beer and play the banjo and I want to be a hermit living off the grid.
Yeah.
And the other part of me feels very unnerved by my sudden disconnect. Slightly horrified by how ephemeral my connection with the outside world is. No computer=no skype to call home with; no ability to easily blog or email; no photos to show that I’ve been where I said I’ve been; no quick reassuring notes between long absent friends and acquaintances.
Everything suddenly feels very tenuous. If two computers can fry over the course of one weekend, what else could go just as suddenly? And do I have a support system in place to keep me going if worse things (death, job loss, family illness) occur? What is my backup plan?
Do I need to start investing in goats and banjo sheet music yet?
8 Responses
Oh dear. I know how you feel. My Apple Mac has suddenly decided it doesn’t feel the need to connect to the internet anymore. Just as I arrive back in Cusco, which I expect to find totally bereft of anyone who knows anything about how to fix a Mac.
So yeah, I have my desktop here in the office, but the blogging, the writing, just don’t flow. I’m tired of transferring files back and forth on USB. Windows kills my creativity. And yeah, the frustration is tinged with a tiny, tiny hint of joy. Yes! What an excuse to just let it all slide!
Can I come and make goats cheese and brew beer with you?
You are always welcome to join me in the goat cheese making and beer brewing. Alas, I can’t do it from up here on the 16th floor in central Shanghai but I know where I can get land! I can have goat! I can have beer! The banjo will be played!
The funny thing with the disconnect is that I feel torn between restlessness (must write…but can’t write on paper anymore…feels weird…must read…but book too much work and has no tabs I can click through when bored) and elation at being freed from my words, my old emails (bearing good news and bad news both), my pictures, my stuff. I don’t watch videos. I can’t change the music on my ipod (again with the Apple products- I must be nuts!). I haven’t been without a laptop since early 2002. Seriously. This is new for me.
Ouch. I totally feel your pain on this one — I realized how dependent I’d become on my computer when my hard drive died last year. Since I moved abroad, it’s my telephone, my TV, my stereo — my lifeline! Fortunately I didn’t lose much of anything in that crash. Hopefully the same will be the case for you. I do appreciate the value of going offline for a while… I just prefer to do it voluntarily!
It’s funny, actually, because my old clunker of a 2002 Dell (Windows XP!) is still going strong after over 6 years full time in Turkey and now two more years as my mother’s portable solitaire portal. I had bought my first Mac in Dubai in 2006 because I thought it’d be stronger and more resilient against viruses and Microsoft nonsense…and it was until the battery exploded/puffed up back in February. That’s why I got the new one when I went home- the old one just wasn’t running the same after the battery went. Grindy. Nerve wracking. I think I transfered everything over onto my portable before it died but I’m not sure and that kind of freaks me out. My life tends to be on these infernal machines and now that both died over the course of one weekend, I feel really vulnerable. Don’t like it.
It’s funny because I started travelling back in the early 90s before internet cafes, before casually-affordable laptops, before the concept of mp3s or Skype and whatnot and I was just fine.
Oh dear, this is my nightmare. I am constantly living in fear that I will fry my Macbook especially since I don’t have enough money at the moment to replace it. There’s no way I could write my blog from an Internet cafe (just walking by those places gives me the heebie jeebies!) and I’m no good at milking goats (a fact I know for certain after being forced to milk many a goat during my formative years… but my sister is a goat farmer — so if you need any goat farming tips, let me know!).
Luckily I could replace mine but oh, god, the hole in my bank account where that money used to be makes me ache at the stupidity of it all. I’m almost embarrassed by how much of my life is tied up in this machine (or rather, these machines, now that I’ve killed two and am being a helicopter parent to the newborn third).
I was thinking I’d become a renowned artisanal goat cheese maker. Is that an actual job?
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I saw this really good post today….
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