The Wheel-Reinvented

To my fellow Mac lovers/users:

MacBook Wheel

Play, laugh, dream! :)

(Thanks Mary, for sharing this.)

Why I <3 Apple

Apple, Apple, I adore you! Let me sing your praises!

My laptop went in for repair (due to a dead hard drive) via our local DHL driver on Monday afternoon. I received a prompt email from Apple that it arrived at their repair facility on Monday night. By Tuesday afternoon, my laptop had been repaired and was leaving the facility. How's that for speedy service? I anxiously waited for the door bell to ring all day yesterday hoping that by some miracle it would arrive in less than a day. No such luck, but this morning, at 10:30, my door bell indeed rang and there was my MacBook. I was so excited! You don't know how much you miss your laptop until you have to use an antiquated POS machine for a few days. I could barely contain myself from ripping the box to shreds to get my machine out. I opened the "proper" way and saw my beautiful, white 13" MacBook staring at me (computers stare, didn't you know?). I booted it up, heard the Apple chime and life was good. What came next, I never expected in my wildest dreams. I mean, I know they had to reinstall and operating system and all, but who would've thought that they would---

INSTALL LEOPARD (the latest and greatest OS) for FREE?> It *almost* makes up for losing my documents and a few pictures...almost. I cannot wait until Ben gets home. I am going to have to help him pick up his chin off of the floor when he hears the news.

So, ladies and gents, I'm back online, super fast, and with the latest and greatest. Next time Apple, you can throw in another gig of RAM and a 20" iMac!

Sunk My Battleship

I am officially out of commission. My MacBook's hard drive bit the dust over the weekend with not so much as a warning. Everything was running smoothly when we stepped out for a few hours. I come home and attempt to wake up the sleeping machine only to find that the screen saver had froze. No biggie, I'm thinking, it happens. So, I restarted my laptop, thinking that it would cure whatever was ailing the poor thing. After a prolonged period of time (mind you, it usually starts up in under 20 seconds), I finally see this-- I knew, in the back of my mind, that this couldn't be a good thing. I called my 24/7 on-call tech support man (read my husband) into the room to diagnosis the problem. Turns out that my hard disk decided that it had lived a long enough life and quit on me. Ben tried and tried to get it up and running again & trying to retrieve my data. A call to AppleCare (so glad that we got that included--for free--with both of our Macs) confirmed Ben's suspicions and a box to mail my useless laptop to Apple is en route to our house.

I cried a few tears over the documents and a few pictures that I had lost. Thankfully, I download most of my pictures to Flickr, so they are stored there and we can get them back relatively easy. I just do not know if the last batch downloaded on to Flickr is indeed the last round of pictures I took. Those precious moments will never happen again, so I'm in mourning. I suppose it could've been a lot worse, if I had had some pertinent information stored on my laptop. Lucky for me, it was mostly saved relay chat conversations and a few recipes. Somehow, I know life will go on.

Apple said that I will be without my beloved for 7-10 days, so, in the meantime, I am forced to use Ben's Mac Mini. It's a great computer, don't get me wrong, but it's not as convenient as my laptop and doesn't have all of my tabs & bookmarks that I worked so hard to find and set up. I will have a lot to do when I get my laptop back, to get it back to my liking. One good thing though, Ben is going to up my RAM when it comes back! We are also going to do a back up weekly, so that I never have to lose photos, videos or documents again!

So Judy, I kind of know what you were suffering through with your computer issues. It bytes...we rely on our computer more than we'd like to admit.

My name is Laura and I'm addicted to my laptop.