FIRST BLOG - A DEATH & A NEW BABY

Having been inspired by my good friend Fangs, I have also decided to venture into the exciting world of BLOGs & do my own.
Also partly encouraged by my new baby - the 12 inch G4 Powerbook - which came into my possession just today.
In case you're wondering, no, this wasn't quite an impulse buy but one of necessity.
My trusty Ti Bk decided to give up the ghost suddenly last night, just after I got home from work & had replied to several emails !

Most distressing, the experience of being suddenly bereft of what has been an essential tool for communication with loved ones back home in Singapore, as well as for doing various things like banking & bill paying and of course, the reason for my being here - training & research !

I couldn't believe it at first as it was so unexpected.
I tried to wake my Ti Bk after I finished preparing a quick dinner of instant noodles with choy sum & mushroom pork balls ( yes, u can get them noodles here quite easily ! ).
All I could get was a plain blue screen with just the cursor....reminded me of that episode in SATC when Carrie's Mac died....well, at least i didn't get the "Sad Mac"....

After frantically trying to restart several times with no result, I finally called the Apple shop in Funan Centre ( MultiMedia Integrated, henceforth known as MMI ) to look for the person who helped me upgrade my OS to Tiger just last month.
His name is Ian & it so happened that my timing was so "joon"-unknown to me, he had actually quit working there to go back to studies but had gone back just at that time to get something.

So, thank God, I got hold of Ian & he was immediately helpful ( thanks a million !) as most Mac users are.
The working diagnosis was that it might be a motherboard problem & it was bad timing as I was actally scheduled for a research meeting the next morning & all the data was on the computer with no other backup (yeah, my bad !).
He tried to walk me through transferring stuff from the HD to an external one which I had bought just a month before-all this through the phone as I have autoroaming & am still holding my S'pore mobile here.

In the end, after all my struggles, I could not keep awake & keep track of what I was doing, so finally went to sleep at 3AM.
To cut a long story short, I managed to call one of the Apple Centres here & went down to see what could be done to get all my stuff back & running ASAP.

As it seemed like it was a motherboard problem, the solution was to replace it or get a new machine. So I decided to go for the latter option as that came with newer things & it was probably time to upgrade my Ti Bk as well.

The moral of the story - technology's great but when it is not working properly, it can also be a really BIG hassle, so always try to take the greatest care of what you have & back up stuff often !

It's amazing how much we rely on computers these days....can't imagine life without them any more....