My technology week from hell

So, usually I love technology. Usually I rant and rave about how it makes my life easier and how I’m able to do so many great things with technology that my friends just can’t understand.

Not this week.

Last weekend, I went back home for the Australia Day long weekend, which was fantastic — catching up with friends and family for the last time before I’ll head back to Uni. While I was away, I did some package updates on my server in Sydney which I use as a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device, as well as an internal VoIP server. Primarily I updated some NFS (networked file system) packages, thinking that it was the right thing to do — of course which it usually is.

When I returned back to Sydney, my MacBook died on the Monday I returned within hours of me walking in the door. .Mac, which is temperamental at the best of times, failed to sync my iCal calendars properly (while successfully syncing everything else), so I’ve got no recent copy of my calendars — which has left me without any idea of what I’m specifically doing this week.

So, I’ve been using my old PowerBook G4 as a portable machine once again. Unfortunately though, my NFS server has broken (due to what I think is the package updates I did) and so iTunes doesn’t work because my entire library is stored on my NAS which has made it difficult to listen to my favourite podcasts and downloading music from the iTunes store.

Right now, I’m waiting for people who are smarter than I, to write back to my posts in the great linuxquestions.org forums. My MacBook is in the AppleCentre Service Department at Broadway (thank goodness for the 1 year warranty with all Apple products), and I probably won’t get it back for a few weeks judging by the experience of a friend who took his MacPro in to the same centre recently.

At least I’m not totally cut off from the world – my PowerBook is still going strong, even with a short battery life these days. Hopefully, I’ll be able to post in a week and thank a whole bunch of people from LQ’s and the AppleCentre for their support – but right now, I’ll just sit tight and hope for the best.

-james