Alasdair

I'm with Dr Johnson

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10/6/08 10:35 am - Life Without My Beloved

Day 10.

Nearly started to sob uncontrollably last night, when after taking my camera out and about for the first time in ages, I plugged it into the laptop to take the photos off and see if there was anything decent in there. The screen is so fucking tiny, and the work area even smaller. How am I supposed to work on photos when they're not twice the size of my head on the screen?

In theory, I should hear about repair costs today. At this point, I'll pay almost whatever they ask, if I can just have my real computer back sharpish.

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9/30/08 04:12 pm - Status Report

Arrival at office: 9:10am.
Time when I was able to start the work I had planned today: 4:15pm.

Progress!

9/27/08 06:41 pm - So Much For A Quiet Weekend

So, this was the first weekend in a while where overtime wasn't y'know, a thing that was happening. I was looking forward to a nice, relaxing weekend of doing not-a-lot.

Woke up this morning to discover that my beloved iMac had died in the night. Looks like the power supply went. In diagnosing the problem, I managed to kill the power supply for my Macbook, too - looks like a dodgy socket in the 4-gang I've been using for some years now. So first things first, off to the apple store for a new power supply for the Macbook. (That's some fucking racket they've got going there, charging 60 quid a throw to replace them.) And I've picked at a new 8 gang with monster surge protection, and special indicator lights to let me know if there's a problem, so with any luck I won't put my vital electronics at risk again.

Have made arrangements to get the iMac taken away, and probably repaired, but that's still several hundred quid I could have done without spending. (It's *just* out of warranty, by a matter of weeks, which is a complete fucker.)

On the bright side: I have lost no data whatsoever. The last backup Time Machine did was about 2am this morning, and plugging the external drive into the Laptop confirms that all is OK. There was a hairy moment when I realised that the backup drive was plugged in to the same 4-gang, but it really does seem to have been a single socket with the problem.

So: I'm going to be annoyingly out of pocket, and I've got a few weeks of living with this strange, stunted little laptop screen as my main work space, and a hard drive that's missing most of my music collection, and my photo library. (And come to that, a machine that really isn't up to serious photo editing, but I don't really have anything outstanding, anyway.) But it could have been much worse.

So, because what happened to me can happen to you, I ask: when did you last do a backup? If your computer died today, what would *you* lose?

9/26/08 05:37 pm - In London Last Night

Saw this last night, and felt compelled to share it with the world.

9/25/08 02:23 pm - Throw The Switch Igor! Throw the Fucking Switch!

Not that most of you are going to care terribly much, but the project that has been eating my life for the last few months went live today, in a more-or-less pain free manner. There’s been a few minor tweaks, but nothing has fallen over, nothing has broken, and no-one is running around like a headless chicken.

The new Slug and Lettuce pub chain website is now live. And while it looks quite simple, it has a completely state of the art on-line booking system (and it is my business to know what state of the art in this field is - it really is better than anyone else’s, I promise you). I could bore you all rigid with waffle about the clever features, the ultra sexy (and user-friendly) admin system, and so on and forth, but the acid test is simpler than that: since going live a couple of hours ago, they have already had a reasonable number of enquiries via this system. Client confidentially prevents me from giving away precise numbers, but we appear to be on course to put through as many hundred covers in two days as their old system did in a month. And that’s on launch day. Things will only improve over the next year or so.

So, yeah. That’s done. Next!