Trouble never comes singly
Last week my Pentax bit the dust by falling out of my handlebar bag, which was bad, because it will cost several hundred dollars to replace if I’m lucky and can find a cheap auction on ebay. So I decided that I’d just sell off my macbook air and go back to the old macbook instead, but when I started moving all of my software over to it I discovered, in quick succession, that (a) the cd-rom drive in the macbook was dead, then (b) the macbook itself would not reboot when I powered it off to do a force eject on the macos install cd that was going whiirt-whiirt-whiirt in the drive. It’s been sitting there with a little spinny wheel under the macos logo for, oh, about 15 minute now, and in the grand tradition of macos it’s not actually telling me what’s going on there that the New! Improved! version of MacOS that Apple’s software update program installed for me broke CD-rom support (to the point where I had to reset the bios to get it to recognise (via an <option> boot) the cd-rom again,) aaaand the OS update script was gumming up a command line (I only noticed this by an <open-apple>v boot where I could actually see the Unix kernel boot messages scrolling by, then abruptly and ominously stopping with a string of “command not found"s for every argument on a commandline which moved in a new version of sudo) which stopped the boot process dead in its tracks, thus converting the Macbook into a ominously humming boatanchor.
Stupid stupid computers.
And it takes effing forever to install MacOS 10.4, then upgrade it to MacOS 10.5 (which, now that 10.6 is out, will probably suffer the same sort of “oh, hey, that’s an old machine and OS – here’s an update that will totally gum it up for you!” failure sooner or later.)
But, after a brief 24 hours of rsync'ing my iPhoto library over (a 2mbit wireless link isn’t that slow for day-to-day activity, but it’s really slow when running rsync on a large machine) the Macbook Air is now out of service and ready to be sold.
*sigh*