Macback
Playing a gig is tiring. There’s the actual playing on stage—which can get pretty sweaty—but it’s the hauling of amps and instruments that inevitably means that a gig night is a late night. So after playing a Salter Cane concert on Friday night, I had a nice long lie-in on Saturday.
When I did finally emerge, I slothfully sat with my iBook, casting a casual eye over the Web via Twitter, Flickr and all my habitual haunts. At five minutes to midday, I glanced at my mobile phone and saw that I had missed a call. In no particular hurry, I listened back to my voice mail.
The message was from Robert Harding, the authorised Apple service provider who was replacing the hard drive in my borked Macbook. The message said that my laptop was ready but I’d need to pick it up before noon. That was just five minutes away!
I quickly called him back and asked if he could stay open a little longer. It turns out that he normally doesn’t even work on a Saturday but he had gone the extra mile to get this done and he really needed to be somewhere else soon… but he would hang on until ten past twelve.
I’ve never dressed so fast in my life. While I was donning some clothing, Jessica called a taxi for me. I ran downstairs and began counting the seconds until the cab came ‘round the corner. It showed up, I hopped in, and away we went.
I made it. Just. While the taxi waited outside, I ran in and grabbed my Macbook, thanked Robert Harding profusely—he gets a thumbs-up from Jane and Richard too—and took the same cab back home.
Now I had my Macbook back with a brand new hard drive. Thus began a long day of file transfers, downloads, SVN checkouts and cabalistic command-line push-ups involving Apache, PHP and MySQL. I’ve just about managed to restore the machine back to the state it was in before its meltdown.
And not a moment too soon: in a few minutes I’ll be heading to the airport to grab a flight to New York where I’ll spend the week giving workshops and consulting with Time Warner. I had more or less resigned myself to bringing the iBook but, assuming that this machine stays fixed, the extra power of the Macbook will come in handy.
Expect numerous clichéd tourist photos in my Flickr stream.
Sunday, July 22nd, 2007 10:07am
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