blogging from the battle bridge...

Okay, I don't have a battle bridge* just the blue and white G3 Mac. I would post from my beloved Titanium, but just now she is being bitchy w me, apparently jealous/pissed off about my making eyes at the new Intel-chipped Apple laptops...

Of course she doesn't focus on the whole "beautiful" bit I wrote about her, oh no. All she's thinking about is how I happened to look at another laptop.

As punishment, she's withholding. Y'know... action. And I have a feeling she may seriously be considering a separation. I would NEVER have pushed for that. You read it, didn't you? I'd never just drop her, y'know, desert her. I mean, not that I'm, like DEFINITELY looking to get myself a new model, y'know, in a serious way, at least.... y'know... not, right away...? But I'm being punished now just for LOOKING? C'mon... Have you seen them? I mean, hey, look at them!

How could I NOT?

Frack. I'm probably doing more harm than good talking about it. She'll find out, of course.

By common law, or at least possession, she's got full custody of all my music and photos.

Not good.

Okay, what's going on, or what seems to be going on, is that my hard drive on the Titanium is not spinning up on start-up (I push the power button, and I can see the caps-lock key light up when I hit it, but the Mac never actually starts up), or when it does, it eventually spins down and stops, and the Mac completely freezes up (the mouse/cursor stops responding, as does the keyboard, and I hafta hold down the power button to shut it off). I've tried zapping the p-ram a few times, and while it did start up a couple times after doing that, I don't think it's having any real effect.

I'm hoping that I'll get the drive to spin up again a few times later today, so I'm heading out to the Apple store to get a big fat hard drive to copy whatever I can when I do get lucky like that. Bleah.

I know I could get cheaper hardware at MicroCenter, but I feel like spending my money at Apple for now. Maybe build up some Apple karma. Also, I can get some chicken teriyaki at the food court (Chick-Fil-A is closed on Sundays... frickin frackin God : P).

If you've got any other ideas or advice on how to retrieve stuff, or somehow trick my hard drive into behaving, please feel free to leave a suggestion. I'll run the problem by the GeniusBar if I can get some facetime with one of their staff today, too.

Keep on keepin on~

* Battle Bridge. In STAR TREK: NEXT GENERATION, the Enterprise could be separated into two spaceshippy components: the saucer section and the rest of the ship. I think they only did it twice, in the television premiere and then in GENERATIONS, the movie, where no one finds out who'd win in a fight, Kirk or Picard. Anyhow, the saucer gets the bridge as its control center, the one everyone knows, with the giant screen TV and the comfy chairs w the drink holders, and the rest of the ship - maybe it should be called the battleship? - is commanded from a smaller, stripped-down version of the bridge, the battle bridge.

Later that day...

Mac-man Jeff got in touch to advise me of some options. And my trip to the Apple store backs him up on them. I ended up picking up a LaCie external drive to use as backup storage space. When I get to work tomorrow I'll shop around online for a decently priced replacement for the internal hard drive on my laptop. Right now I want to get all of my photos and music (together about 30 gigs - most of that is digital pics!) along with some of my animation files duped somewhere safe.

The key thing that Jeff told me about, and the Genius Bar staff reiterated, is the ability to power up the laptop as an external firewire hard drive. With my particular laptop, you can do that by holding down the "T" key when pushing the power button. Once that's done, it can be read by another Mac as an external firewire hard drive. Those Apple boys are pretty frickin smaht. =)

I'm doing a massive file copy right now, having mounted both my laptop and the new LaCie drive on the blue and white G3. Thing is, the G3 is running OS9.x and the laptop, when she's not freezing me out, runs OS10.2, so I wonder what files of mine might be incompatible. So, I'm gonna try this, probably have to let it run overnight, see how successful it is. I expect there'll be SOME kind of difficulty w part of it, foo. So I'll bring all my hardware with me to the office and try doing the same thing thru one of the machines at work running OS X. I think we might have a utility that will not just copy the files, but actually dupe the drive. Then I could dupe that onto the replacement internal drive I end up getting.

Dunno that this entry will help anyone out out there, but I sorta needed to write it out for myself to see it in front of me as something resembling a plan, y'know? =)

I've got a couple other entries started, but only saved as drafts... I'm holding back/slacking on completing, cuz I don't have all the resources I usually do when I'm working directly on the laptop. Hopefully that won't hold back my rambling for too long... Don't want to go back to loading and unloading the gun, right?

Right?

=)

Keep on keepin on~