Ephemera and Detritus

Ceci n’est pas un laptop

Laptops go well with Rumba Gusta

It was a few hours after we got the news that our flight to Chengdu was to be delayed from noon until night that I got the call from the techie at the apple store. We were already at the airport, trying to kill time by borrowing the piddly wifi and drinking 30kuai watery beers. I didn’t even hear my phone for the first minute or so that it rang- my ring tone is the Muppets’ mnah mnah song and it frequently doesn’t dawn on me that it’s connected to a phone.
Anyway.
The kindly fellow called to inform me that my logic board was irretrievably fried and that it would cost about as much to fix it as to buy a whole new one. Oh, and have a lovely national day golden week holiday! Since he was calling me from work on what should have been a bank holiday, I wished him a restful remainder of the week.
So our week in Chengdu was off to an auspicious start.
We’re back now, flown in this afternoon. I dashed out to pudong to claim the body and to pick out a new one. Since my hard drive was not affected by the mystery shot of espresso that killed the logic board, the lovely lily zhang at the genius bar is busy copying all my data to the caffeine free MacBook pro. It should be ready by morning.
As I’m writing this on my iPod’s tiny touch screen, I am limited in what I can post tonight. There are tons of hopefully lovely/weird/appropriate photos waiting to be uploaded and there are a number of things about Chengdu and china and national holiday hordes waiting to burst forth from my brain as soon as the more conducive medium is picked up and running.
For now I shall resume reading books and doing non-internet based activities. Radical.

Next day ETA: Got new Mac back! Got photos uploaded! Feel human again! For now, I have links to uploaded Facebook albums here and here and here. I’ll try to get stuff up on this site as soon as I get my act together.

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MaryAnne

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Comments

5 responses to “Ceci n’est pas un laptop”

  1. Fiona at Life on Nanchang Lu Avatar
    Fiona at Life on Nanchang Lu

    Had to laugh…..although of course I aM deeply sorry for your loss. The week before I left Australia I spilt a cup of really crap instant coffee all over My keyboard. Incredibly, the only perManent casualty was the letter M. So now I have to cut and paste an M whenever I want one, and occasionally, like now, it’s a capital M instead of a sMall one because that’s what I last used, and I can’t be bothered going and finding another sMall M to cut+paste. So the text looks terrible. It drives Me Mad but the thought of going tech cold turkey for 2 weeks while they fix it leaves Me cold.
    Enjoy the blackout I say!

    Reply
    1. MaryAnne Avatar
      MaryAnne

      Apparently fancy home brewed espresso is the killer. I did damage to the PC keyboard at work with some stray rosebud tea and now it is incapable of producing double letters. Thus, if I type ‘too’ it will emerge as ‘to’ if I try to tap ‘o’ twice in a row.

      Going tech cold turkey was certainly weird- even in rural Myanmar there were heaps of net cafes but for whatever reason, the combo of time off from work for the holiday and the Chinese scarcity (and unpleasantness) of net cafes left me strangely disconnected over the past fortnight. It feels so soothing to be back.

      Reply
  2. Renee Avatar
    Renee

    Hi, MaryAnne.

    This tragically entertaining post has reminded me to backup more regularly. So, thank you for that. Glad to hear your hard drive survived.

    Am chuckling about the cell phone. I haven’t noticed mine ringing once ever since my daughter switched the ringtone to a barking dog.

    Cheers,
    Renee

    Reply
    1. MaryAnne Avatar
      MaryAnne

      Hi Renee,

      Lovely to see you here. I’m still in mourning for harddrive #1 (the old white MacBook one) which is irretrievably dead but relieved beyond belief that #2 survived the caffeine. I shudder to think how I’d feel after two HD deaths in one weekend. One was shocking enough. Funny how much of one’s life is held in a piddly little tech thing. So vulnerable!

      A barking dog ringtone would probably never get answered by me…it’d never ever dawn on me that it was a phone, even after months of barking. A student of mine back in Istanbul had an awesome ringtone: it was a woman singing the words ‘ring ring ring ring’ over and over, very prettily.

      Reply
  3. Renee Avatar
    Renee

    “Ring ring ring ring”…lovely! I need to put a little more effort into this ringtone business.

    Reply

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