My mind is so devoid of anything interesting right now, it depresses me. Lying down for a bit, I felt like I was spinning.

No solid ground to stand on.

So, today, I committed myself to a quasi-flame war on the Alibata group listserv on Yahoo. (I could dig through the archives and point out the post that started it all, but, eh, who cares?) That's about the extent of my entertainment today.

So, yeah, I haven't been able to post in quite a while now. Not that you're missing much, anyway. But it has been a frustrating week in some ways. It all begins with the fucked up iBook. Oh yeah, I haven't mentioned that.

Anyway, my iBook started crapping out on me while I was still in the Bay Area, necessitating a trip to the Apple Store in Emeryville. (My God, what have they done to that place?) It apparently looked like a logic book problem, so I turned it over to them, and they promised to ship it to me in L.A. after 5-7 days (it only took 6, all told.) So I was happy. It was working. I decided to install Panther on it.

Now, I don't really think that installing Panther on it could've caused the problems. I don't think. Of course, stranger things have been known to happen in the quantum realm of doped gallium-arsenic (I am such a nerd, yeah, it's the stuff that computer chips are made of. At least they were the last time I checked. God knows that Moore's Law makes everything I know more and more obsolete.)

Anyway, it started with freezing up after bootup whenever I would take the iBook off of external power. While sucky, and rendering my iBook somewhat non-portable, I took it in stride. Eventually, though, I headed on out to the Apple Store in the Glendale Galleria to have them give it a once over. Yup. Freeze up after booting on battery power. Maybe it's the PMU. Isn't the PMU on the logic board? Yeah. Hmmm. Well, let me back up my data, then I'll come back if it still isn't working.

So I go to Fry's to buy a hard drive to backup my data with. (What's a trip home without a trip to Fry's? Man, I don't know why I keep going back to that place. I guess I am a masochist after all.) The first one I pick up is that Ximeta networkable hard-drive. I was disappointed. I thought it was a fully fledged server, but it's not. You've got to install some bizarre drivers onto a Windows machine. Unfortunately, these funky drivers managed to take out my brother's USB 802.11b attachment. So no network. No go. And I wasn't about to try backing up 30 GB across a USB 1.0 connection.

Back to Fry's.

This time I pick up an Iogear 80 GB external hard drive. It was actually pretty sweet. It's almost quieter than my Smartdisk Firelite 60 GB. The only thing is that it needs external power, and it's relatively honking huge, making it not-so portable. Psync'ing 30 GB across Firewire still takes an incredibly long time, but not so long that my beard starts growing or anything. I'm happy. Everything looks good. I wipe my hard drive and try a clean isntall of Panther. Booting up OK. No lockups. Hookup the hard drive. Weird clicking sounds. Uh.... No Firewire volume showing up on the Desktop. This isn't good.

Most of my data got wiped out. I was able to salvage some of it through some jujitsu-like hacking techniques that I won't go into to 'cuz my head hurts. But some key e-mails are forever gone. Good thing I backed up my hard drive before I headed out to the Bay Area. So I've only really lost about 6 weeks of stuff. I've suffered worse.

Of course, I stayed up until 5am trying to recover my crap, but hey, I guess I gotta get used to obscene hours again.

If I didn't hang out with R these past two weeks, I could honestly say that I did nothing while in L.A.

(to be continued....)