What happened? Well, let me simply say this: never put your drink bottle in the same bag as your laptop. My laptop was only a little damp when we arrived at Liz’s, and I know the leaking could only have occurred during the last leg of our journey, but the computer still wouldn’t start up. I let it rest for a week assuming it would dry out and be fine, but it wasn’t, and when Apple received it they pronounced the logic board and the hard drive dead and gone and sent me my old computer back with a hard drive empty but for a very minimalistic install of the operating system. New installs of Word and Photoshop and Endnote and Dreamweaver and iLife will have to wait till I return to the university server. Can you believe Apple ships without iPhoto these days? At least, they ship repaired computers without iPhoto. iSync and iTunes I could download, iPhoto I can’t.
Backups? Oh yes, I had a recent backup on my iPod. Except I seem to have shut the computer before it was done or something, cos less than half the stuff I thought was there is really there. And, uh, something must have gone wrong, cos I’m sure this backup was just a few weeks ago, ya know, but the dates on the files is February. And, uh, yes, backing up stuff was on my to do list before travelling, but after finishing work stuff, packing and cleaning I decided to go to bed instead…Got all my music, though, thanks to iPod Access, and contacts and calendars are fine too.
Unfortunately I didn’t have a paper record of my password to my blog, either, but Hanna adeptly command-lined the mysql database into changing it for me and yay, apart from not being able to blog photos (no iPhoto, no Photoshop, can you believe iPhoto’s not part of the basic install and not downloadable either?) well apart from that, there is a certain exhilaration in starting over. Imagine how uncluttered my computer will be!
Stewart
Hi Jill,
Yeah, Apple were a bit sneaky around that one. They packaged iPhoto, iDVD, and Garageband into iLife last year and have been charging US$49 ever since.
Try downloading version 2 from here:
http://mirrors.wamug.org.au/apple/iphoto/
Stew
Liz
Oh, my. It never occurred to me that you might not have set a root password on your mysql install! Mea culpa. I should have checked that first, and you wouldn’t have been blogless all this time… 🙁
hanna
It wasn’t that there wasn’t a root password on the MySQL install (I’m sure there is a root password set) but rather that the MySQL login details are in the wp-config.php file. With these I could simply log into MySQL and change the passwords for the appropriate WP accounts. However, it’s worth noting that in WP 1.2, the passwords are hashed before being stored in the database. So in order to change them to something that Jill could subsequently use to log onto WP, I had to create a test user using my own WP installation with a known password, and then copy the hashed database entry for that password to Jill’s wp_users table.
Stewart
BTW
The above link is quite legal AFAIK. It’s an older version of iPhoto which Apple gave away for free and is hosted on our local MUG server.
Jill
Thanks Stewart! LOvely to have iPhoto back – though now I remember why I bought iLife: iPhoto 2 is so SLOW!
vlorbik
it looks 1000% better.
the last few times i was here
the graphics were swallowing the text.
ordinarily i’ve given up griping
about this kind of thing but
you’re supposed to be *teaching*
web design and should know these things.
Jill
Yeah, it’s shocking, isn’t it. Good thing I tell my students to do as I say not as I do, huh?
bicyclemark
Was it… Apple Juice? Hiyoooooo.
Thank you very much, Ill be here all week.
Jill
Ha. No, water. Just a trickle. Enough.
Matt K.
If you still have the hard drive and the data’s worth it to you it can almost certainly be recovered by a professional recovery service. Won’t be cheap though.
Jill
Yeah, I know, but thinking through it I realised that what wasn’t online or in my semi-backup really wasn’t that important. There are a couple of things I’d have liked, but nothing that I can’t recreate in a few hours. And that disk recovery stuff is very expensive.
Anyway, Apple kept the old drive and I didn’t make a fuss about it.
Chris
Hey, I just caught up with this thread.
Bad news about iPhoto. I thought that was still part of the basic install but you had to pay to get iDVD. I was pretty sure it came with Jaguar.
What’s really annoying though is that if you want to buy iLife, you have to order the disks. I find that so frustrating. In these days of instant downloads, I expect to be able to give my credit card details and be using the software within half an hour. Oh well ;-(
jill/txt » i had a backup!!!
[…] Usually I only think of backups when it’s too late. But today, when I discovered that my Endnote bibliography was corrupted and wouldn’t open, I only fretted for five minutes before remembering that after that wicked water incident I started using Backup which automatically backs up various files – and the bibliography is one of them! For the first time ever (lucky I guess) I restored a file, and good old Backup had the last twenty versions of it easily available. Now I’ll never again be annoyed at its nagging that I enter my keychain password so it can connect to dot mac. […]
Anonymous
Bad news. The battery on your laptop could’ve gotten on fire. Lithium ion batteries and water don’t mix well together, it could explode. Dangerous stuff!