Daily Cup of Geek

No, seriously. It does.

I know. Any rational person would say, “But wait, Bron… wires and chips? How can they hate you? They can’t feel love or hate — they’re not out to get you.”

Lies. All lies.

A few weeks ago, I got TimeCapsule. I absolutely loved it. It took forever to run the initial back-up (160GB), but aside from that, things were dandy. I got my Airport Express to piggy-back off the network, so I had AirTunes up and running again fairly quickly (which is key… I can’t live without my tunes!). And more than anything, I was stoked to have 1TB of space to dump my digital collection of music, TV, and assortment of odds and ends (including some file back-ups from as early as 2000!).

The honeymoon was over pretty quick. I don’t blame TimeCapsule, exactly… but just technology in general.

A week or so later, after I moved to a new desk at work, my computer begin to suffer a massive failure. Whatever I did, I could only get a few network drives to work in the office. The VPN failed me. Email was hopeless (even webmail wouldn’t work, if I was “on the network” in the office). After struggling with it for 5 hours, I pinged one of our IT guys.

(Some quick specs:

I run a 15″ MacBook Pro w/ Leopard. We need Windows (XP, thank you very much) for several work apps, so I have Parallels 3.0 running that.)

After several more hours, file clean-ups, etc., we come to the conclusion that we are best off dumping my XP virtual machine. It has to be Windows causing this mayhem, right?

(Note: not actually my computer… but the feeling was very much the same.)

Unfortunately no. We’re stumped. IT guy has never seen anything like this. Hopeless. I’m on Day 2. No work is being done thanks to the drama and my computer-less existence.

By the end of Day 2, we conclude that wiping the hard drive and reinstalling Leopard is the way to go. After some missing disk drama and a painful trip to Best Buy, half way through Day 3 and I’m on my way back to being fully operational.

Except that TimeMachine back-up? Somehow it had been corrupted, and was useless.

The good news is that I thought ahead enough to back-up all of my files separately - but software, preferences, draft blog posts (I’m using ScribeFire), etc., were not lucky enough to survive the massacre and I have slowly been building my system back to where I was pre disaster.

I never thought I would be so happy to be able to work again!

That wasn’t the only technology drama. The VPN still won’t work for me; my home network crashed earlier this week; my Blackberry keeps throwing errors. I’m grateful my car isn’t more high-tech than it is (’03 Jetta), or I might be in trouble.

I joke that I’m really great at breaking stuff. Heck, that’s the main reason I bothered to sign-up with uTest. But I would call this over kill… wouldn’t you?

This entry was posted by Bronwyn Lewis, on Thursday, May 15th, 2008 at 10:23 pm and is filed under apple, technology, upgrade, work. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.