And the Dead Shall Rise!!

[thedeadlyhook]

Toys's Computer is Back From the Dead.

Believe it! The entire operation involved:

• Me, riding the bus to CompUSA and picking up an external hard drive to back up all the data on the dead machine. It wouldn't start up at all, but like a good Apple machine in zombie mode, would at least boot up in hard disc mode.
• Toys, backing up the entire contents of zombie!Mac, with my laptop operating as the "brain" in Rube Goldberg-like daisy chain of network cables.
• Toys, also backing up my laptop's contents, because having redundant backups is an especially damn good idea when you only have one working machine.
• A complete disc wipe and clean reinstall on the iMac.
• A nail-biting startup.

...and the old machine was new again.

As part of its new lease on life, Toys decided to finally give the iMac a name (after five years of wearing the monniker "Macintosh HD"), collect some new icons, and generally make the machine feel loved. Please join me in sending it Tinkerbelle-style happy thoughts to keep it healthy. (crosses fingers)

In other news, today we saw - in the middle of Golden Gate Park's music concourse, right in front of the DeYoung museum - a Great Blue Heron stalking and catching a gopher! Amazingly, Toys and I seemed to be the only people in the fairly busy plaza to notice this HUGE bird sneaking around the lawns and stabbing at the ground with its beak. It was surreal.

Then there was this runaway dog near Irving St., but that's a whole other story.

I have my laptop back!!!

Comments

[toysdream.livejournal.com]

...and then there was the whole painstaking process of manually moving individual system files back onto the old machine. That's what I did with my Sunday, folks!

I should mention that my newly christened iMac has been dubbed "King Bow", because it looks like a colossal Chinese pork bun with a flat-panel LCD sprouting from the top. Sadly, I was unable to find an icon of a pork bun, so instead it's represented on the desktop by a green candy heart with the inscription GOATS!

And for anyone still reading this, let me reiterate that the Gopher-Hunting Heron was freaking cool. Nothing like watching a four-foot-tall monster bird stalking tiny mammals to reconnect you with the wonders of the natural world.

[thedeadlyhook.livejournal.com]

I do feel like I learned something about the patience of nature photographers too. But at least unlike those folks on Planet Earth duty, we didn't have to climb a mountain of guano or perch in a duck blind for days on end to see the heron score a hit. Who knew GG Park was such a target-rich environment?