I spent the better part of the weekend fixing my laptop. Aside from the time I spent on forced frivolity Friday (where Megacorp sent us on a river cruise for team building, etc) I watched web sites as they tracked the progress of my laptop from the repair facility to the Apple Store in Portland. It took the store a while to process my laptop, but I got it back. And then the fun began.

There’s a lot of uninteresting details I could provide about how hard it is when you try to be clever, backing up the drive to an image, repartitioning, finding out the backup software won’t restore from an image, hooking up a hard drive and two laptops to copy data to a place where the backup software might possibly find it, find out that the computer won’t work when you restore it that way, etc, but I finally had to just go out and buy a $200 external hard drive to do what I needed to do. The backup had to be restored to the $200 hard drive that pretended to be a Mac pretending to be a hard drive. All using Firewire, which is more expensive than a USB external drive. Oh, and I decided to buy the drive at the local Mac chain rather than the Apple Store, and I just realized that I paid an extra $20 or so for the privilege. (Not so bad, actually.)

In any case, I fixed my Mac after days of torturing myself with it. This, combined with my desire to watch as many NFL games as I can, will probably make me irresistible to the women of Portland.