“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure — these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.”

“No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of life. It is life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”
- Steve Jobs

Last wednesday was one of those nightmare scenarios every geek dreads. I got up fired up the mac, checked my email then went to grab some breakfast. On my return I was met with the rare but horribly daunting grey screen of death, otherwise known as a kernel panic.

I’ve only ever had a couple of these in over 5 years as a Mac owner and usually a power cycle is all that’s needed, but sadly not this time. Several reboots, safe boots, hardware self tests and verbose mode confusion boots later I’d come to the sickening realisation that yes, it’s broken.

I even stripped it right back to a minimal bootable configuration, removed all my drives and external peripherals, swapped the SSDs for the original boot drive which I knew was a valid boot disk, still no joy. Locked hard on the apple logo.

Damn.

So, genius bar appointment booked for Thursday morning where the lovely Nick went through much the same process I had before plugging in a USB drive to run some more thorough diagnostics on the main board before proclaiming that indeed it was a definitely a hardware fault and they’d have to take her in for the attention of very clever people who live behind the shiny aluminium portal that leads into the secret world beyond us mere mortals. I reckon I must’ve had a bit of dust in my eye or something because as they wheeled her off through the door it was like watching the vet wheel your dog off into the operating theatre and your not actually quite sure if you’ll ever see her again..

As a side note, tut tut Apple.. They said they’d phone me on Thursday evening with a status update. It’s Sunday now and i’m still waiting for that call..

Oh, and to top it all, a mate of mine *really* fucked me off this morning with a particularly smart-arsed comment.. I pointed out it was really bad timing as I had a load of important work-related stuff I needed to be getting on with and was totally scuppered without my Mac so his particularly thoughtful reply was “Oh well, you could always get a job stacking shelves in Tesco and then maybe in a couple of years you’ll be able to afford a new one”

Gee thanks. Cunt.

I’m not concerned about data etc. as I’ve got all my drives here and being the geek I am I’ve got multiple current backups in place of everything important but it’s still bloody inconvenient as so much of what I do for both work and hobbies is reliant on that machine. This has made me rethink the idea about getting a laptop as until now I’d never really felt I needed one for portable computing but I can now totally see the value in having a backup Mac in case of emergencies which I could also make use of on the go if I wanted to.. May have to look into picking up a reasonably current machine from somewhere when I figure out what the £damage is on my Mac Pro..

I’m working on a proper photography site (very much WIP at the mo) which also has a photography-related blog. That’s far more likely to get updated than this one I’d imagine so if you’re even remotely interested in a bit of photofoolery then you might like to point yer reader of choice at http://www.richardolpin.co.uk/blog/

Must try harder.