I’m in the middle of a pickle and won’t be able to easily post any sort of update for a while. My beloved PowerBook is showing signs of a catastrophic hard disk failure. I’m trying to get the user files off with SuperDuper! but it’s not going well. I’m getting I/O consistently.

So, despite not really having the moneys for it, it looks like I will be buying a new MacBook very soon. The ol’ PowerBook is too long in the tooth and has far too many other errors to attempt to repair. I’d march down to the Apple Store right now and pick up a new one but the rumors seem to be building that a line refresh is due on the 14th of this month. It would just kill me if I bought this week only to see an entirely new model come out the next, even with the issues that tend to accompany the first revision of an Apple line.

On top of that, the external drive I own has problems on one of its partitions. As both of our computers are somewhat old and having smallish hard disks I took the 320GB drive I bought when last the PowerBook needed to go in for repair to the Apple Store and split it three ways. Two partitions are for SuperDuper! backups of the iMac and PowerBook hard disks. The third is for storage of things that just aren’t needed all the time and take up a bunch of space: movies, roms, music, etc. Today I’ve found this partition refuses to mount and Disk Utility tells me it has an “Invalid B-Tree Node” which seems to be pretty damned bad. I just can’t justify the purchase of Disk Warrior, no matter how awesome it might be, for these files but as they represent many years worth of acquisition I can’t just leave them either.

Oh, balls!

By “her” I mean my PowerBook, which I call Tinúviel because she is an evenstar to her people (me) and because I am a tremendously huge dork. Here’s what happened: last Wednesday I saw that a security update had been made to OS X and proceeded to download with aplomb. Not being particularly cautious and up until now too impatient for backups I jumped right in and set to downloading. It required a reboot to fully install this update, so I let it go ahead and do that. But, it never came back up. Instead of my brilliant orange fall desktop I got an angry shaking line of about 8 to 16 pixels going horizontally across the screen.

I jumped on Staci’s iMac and browsed the knowledge base, making certain to stop by macosxhints and a few search hits for advice. I went through the usual steps. I reset the PRAM. I reset the PMU. I reset the PRAM and the PMU again. Then I realized I probably had a bigger problem on my hand and I made an appointment at my local Genius Bar.

The fellows at the Apple Store, while exceptionally nice, were not able to provide any fixes and decided I might have a hardware problem, possibly related to the logic board. But, since I could still boot it up in target disk mode for backup I decided to hold off on shipping it away. I picked up an external firewire drive and got to backing shit up.

And then, while trying use the iMac to boot off the drive I accidentally allowed Tinúviel to boot up normally and she has worked fine ever since. I don’t have any idea why and I worry that it’s only a matter of time before I lose her again but I guess I’ll just take it as a good sign and keep a current backup just in case.

Hopefully my external drive isn’t as bad as I’ve read. It’s been getting some awful user reviews. I wasn’t actually planning on buying one at a store. I went in for a firewire cable, but this was marked down pretty nicely.

All in all, I think the revival is going quite well. I’ve been more consistent with site maintenance the past week than I ever was, even when this was new. I can see that ever more clearly when I was fidgeting with the archive pages — pages which have proven to be more headache than I had anticipated due largely to my lack of insight into how to style them — and I saw more posts in this month than any previous month.

I’m sitting on the couch in the living room next to Milo who is very noisily napping. He’s been terribly congested of late. His breathing has a high-pitched rattle as he dozes in a nest of small blankets and afghans. My cat snores something fierce.

So, I went up to the local Apple store Saturday evening. Though it should have been against my better judgement, I could not pass up some of the deals awaiting me on the refreshed and returned table. I came home with a more or less brand new AirPort Extreme and a set of cables to go along with the AirPort Express we’d been using for a while now. I didn’t really need either one of them, but both were on my vague and tenuous list of things for my fantasy entertainment center. I had anticipated buying first a receiver and some speakers, but I could not escape the sale.

(I really wonder why all of these AirPort devices were on the sale rack. Methinks, perhaps, those rumors of a video version of the AirPort Express might not be so far off the mark. My local Apple Store had 4 AirPort Extremes, 2 AirPort Expresses, and a set of cables on the refreshed table. Now, maybe someone returned all of that, but I kind of feel like it might have been store models. Maybe.)

Not having a stereo at the moment I hooked it up to the television after reconfiguring my stations to talk to one another appropriately. I also realized that the Express will share the connection through the ethernet port on the bottom so I could finally hook up the Playstation 2 and Xbox (now that the new generation is upon us with all its wifi goodness). I thought I was going to have to buy yet another device to get that rocking. I’m really digging the idea of streaming my music from one end of the house to the other. I’m sure much more well equipped households are scoffing at my delay on jumping onto this bandwagon. It was purely a money thing. . . and I really don’t think I ought to be able to buy the rest of the equipment I need but I sure as shit want to real damn bad.