So Negative Nelly (your gracious and sexah author and host) was dead wrong. Dentist was straightforward and only a little painful (well, actually I expected that would be the case for the dentist). The Apple store was quick - they didn't even need to see the Mac and ordered the drive with no hassle - I was in there only about 45 minutes and the bulk of that was waiting in line at the Genius Bar. IKEA on Monday morning was unreal - I breezed in and out in under an hour. I was home before noon, and managed to even catch a MTGO tournament and built the new shelves in between rounds.
So today I spent a fair amount of time adjusting to life with a sick Mac - I switched BACK to the Mac, got my docs on it, etc and just started backing up early and often. And here's the killer. The Palo Alto store just called and they have my replacement hard drive. Yes, that's right the one they ordered yesterday and had no idea when it would arrive. So all my workflow adjustments are for naught :-) Tonight I'm going to go buy an external HD and just clone the dying drive onto that - I feel safer with that than my "Well I have all the data on the linux box" strategy.
Given that three Macs will get upgraded to Tiger in the next month - having a reliable whole disk backup strategy is sound. Well worth some scratch to make it easy and bulletproof.
The moral of this story is if you live in the Bay Area take your sick Apple hardware to Palo Alto, not Valley Fair. If I had done that three weeks ago it would probably be fixed by now. And I wouldn't have switched between OS X and Windows twice in the last four weeks :-)
So today I spent a fair amount of time adjusting to life with a sick Mac - I switched BACK to the Mac, got my docs on it, etc and just started backing up early and often. And here's the killer. The Palo Alto store just called and they have my replacement hard drive. Yes, that's right the one they ordered yesterday and had no idea when it would arrive. So all my workflow adjustments are for naught :-) Tonight I'm going to go buy an external HD and just clone the dying drive onto that - I feel safer with that than my "Well I have all the data on the linux box" strategy.
Given that three Macs will get upgraded to Tiger in the next month - having a reliable whole disk backup strategy is sound. Well worth some scratch to make it easy and bulletproof.
The moral of this story is if you live in the Bay Area take your sick Apple hardware to Palo Alto, not Valley Fair. If I had done that three weeks ago it would probably be fixed by now. And I wouldn't have switched between OS X and Windows twice in the last four weeks :-)