As of yesterday, my late 2008 aluminum MacBook no longer boots and I'm pretty sure he's dead. In the days leading up to his demise, abrupt power-downs due to overheating grew increasingly frequent. He was just shy of his sixth birthday and still running mostly current software, albeit not always as quickly as I would have liked.

Pan will be reincarnated as a new laptop, also named Pantalaimon because I am original like that, as soon as I get the money together.

I'm afraid my iPod and I are going to have to break up.

It's not me; it's him. It was bad enough when he started hanging my entire computer -- no mean feat -- every time I plugged him in to sync. I managed to patch things up after much reformatting by syncing only a few playlists containing a small fraction of my library, but now he's got a new trick where he drops out in the middle of long tracks like audiobooks and skips to the next one, whistling innocently. Just today he's already skipped the train scene in Half Blood Prince, which is one of my favorite bits! I see a trip to the Apple Store in my future.

Ironically, my 3G iPod is still going strong, if you allow for the fact that even the aftermarket replacement battery no longer holds so much as a secondsworth of charge. Stan uses it in bed plugged into the wall.

My computer's all fixed up and shiny again. I actually don't know what was wrong with my optical drive, but it stopped not working, so I can't really complain, in spite of the fact that I made a trip downtown to the Apple Store to do so. That was slightly awkward. ("Um, you fixed my computer too much!" "So what?" "And also, you replaced my working optical drive with one which does not work!" "Except for the part where it is totally working right now." "Um, yeah. That is true.")

I have been spending approximately all my free time with Sam's older brother Stan, whom I had seen essentially nothing of since high school, because, well. We're both here now, and what else are we going to do? This weekend, though, Sam was here for an orthodontic appointment and the three of us got out our family's collection of Legos, which has actually tripled since the last time we made extensive use of it since my mother picks them up cheap whenever she sees them at garage sales out of nostalgia. Stan built a not-to-scale model of the Abode of Chaos in Lyon, I built a BSDM dungeon (what? There were large Lego whips! It had to be done!), and Sam built something he said was tentacle pr0n.

The best part is that we dumped out the Legos in my brother's bedroom so we will never have to put them away until maybe Thanksgiving.

I finally received my computer back from Apple, who posted it overnight on the Saturday night before a holiday weekend in order to torment me. As you may or may not recall (probably not, because other people's computer problems are pretty boring) I brought it in for a new B key and a functional microphone.

I ended up with a new microphone, a new optical drive, a new LCD and a reformatted (possibly also new!) hard drive with weird, primitive OS 10.3.5 installed. But that is not all, oh no. When I put in my OS 10.4 DVD to begin the dull and tedious process of restoring my computer to its proper condition, it immediately spit it back out again. And then did it again. And again. Yes. They replaced my perfectly functional optical drive with a bulimic one.

I am simply in no condition to deal with this kind of insanity. I believe I spent more time over the course of my extended geeky slumber party of the last two days installing Ubuntu Linux onto my friend Stan's computer than actually sleeping, and installing Ubuntu Linux doesn't really take that long. Then I had to work this morning, and now I am contemplating the logistics of injecting tea directly into my veins.

Incidentally, I watched the first six episodes of Nobuta wo Produce on my mother's computer on Saturday and somebody really needs to write the fic where Fuji and Inui get together to make Kaidoh the most popular boy in Seigaku. I'm just saying.

The nice people at the Apple Store are fixing up my keyboard and repairing my microphone, to boot. Unfortunately, that means the nice people at the Apple Store have my laptop. Apologies to anyone waiting on me to do anything involving files on said laptop.

The people at the Genius Bar never even ask why I keep showing up with a bunch of keys randomly detached and/or missing. I'm not sure why their counterparts in New York keep giving satyadasa and medievalist a hard time when they haven't even been abusing their computers as I do mine.

Anyway, sans laptop, I've been watching random stuff on YouTube, as you do. Two nicely complementary Ouran High School Host Club vids: Tamaki can't wait to be king and Kumori Kingu Kyouya.

When your mother gives you an antique bookshelf to put in your room, and mentions, oh, by the way, the paint on this thing took two weeks to dry, DO NOT ACCEPT IT AND PUT IT IN YOUR ROOM!

Clearly, it is haunted or possessed or both, and will, at the first opportunity, fall over! And then your bedroom will be carpeted in books, and worse, the unholy undead paint will get smeared all over the screen of your laptop, and how the fuck do you get that off? Plus, the B key will be dislodged and lost in the aforementioned carpet of books, so that every time you try to type a word with the letter B in it, such as, oh, say, "books" or "bookshelf", it will not actually work all that well, thereby compounding your frustration!

Why do these things always happen to me? I mean, besides the fact that I'm stupid?

EDIT: Slightly more useful advice, in case you are ever as stupid as me!

Got it off with a handkerchief, some rubbing alcohol, and a very light touch.

Now, to get my keyboard fixed. As it happens, half the letters have worn off again, including the B, so it needs some fixing anyway.

I have got my computer back with a shiny new hard drive in.

On the plus side, I have got my music, my documents, my pictures (except the ones from the last month or so, which I don't think I have) and my bookmarks.

On the not so much with the plus side, I have lost my mail (thousands of LJ notifications!), my book catalogue, and my operating system. This is what happens when your computer dies while you are backing it up. Out of my whole application support folder, I only got the stuff that began with A. Plus, the Apple techs installed 10.3.9, which is weird and primitive, and I can't find my 10.4 install DVD. Woe.

So, uh ... back up early and often, kids. And try not to do it when your hard drive is having a seizure. It's better than nothing, but not by much.

Is my computer suicidal, do you think? Once again, it's decided that it simply doesn't want to boot today, thank you very much, and it is favoring me with the dreaded flashing question mark instead.

I don't think I'm particularly mean to my computer. I don't see why it chooses to betray me like this.

Hopefully they manage to get it to boot again like they did on Yuletide Uploading Day, since it's only about halfway backed up and I would prefer it to be fully backed up, but I really think that they ought to give me a new hard drive, and anything else they think might be causing the problem, for that matter. The hard drive was making scary clunking noises.

EDIT: They have taken it in to replace the hard drive and will transfer the data if they can, emphasis on if. Woe.

At least my documents are backed up. And I can hack into my iPod to get my music back.

I think my computer just likes for me to take it downtown to the Apple Store as often as possible, because when I troubleshoot it? Nothing happens. Not even when I get on the phone with tech support as I do it. But when Mike, the cool guy behind the Genius Bar, troubleshoots it? Voilà. That which was dead is now living.

So, uh. Thanks to everyone for bearing with me last night whilst I was freaking out in your general direction. Hopefully you are all having a lovely winter or summer solstice, as the case may be, and a happy yuletide uploading day where applicable!