I’ve had a bit of an “online blackout” since I returned from speaking at FlashForward two weeks ago. My new Macbook had been acting up for weeks, unexpectedly shutting down a few minutes after awaking it from its sleep. While at the conference I kept dealing with it, in the hopes that my own blind hope would somehow will it away. On the morning of my presentation I prepared the last of my files and left my computer on, hoping to circumvent this weird shutdown problem I was having. I did my presentation and did a little song and dance, literally! After I was finished I closed my Macbook and retired to my room to recharge from the overwhelming enthusiasm I poured out on stage. When I woke up, I opened my computer and bam - totally dead! It could not find the system, it could not boot up under firewire, nothing seemed to work.

I decided to wait until returning home to go to the Apple Store and send it in for repairs but that meant I would be out of a computer for some time. The day after I got home from Austin I went to the Apple Store and met with a “Genius” - amazingly enough he knew exactly the problem I was having and said that 3 other people had come in to that store to send their Macbooks in as well. I got my MacBook back yesterday, and so far, knock on wood, it is working beautifully! The biggest headache for me in these past two weeks has been the inability to do anything with my servers or this blog because all of my passwords were on this computer. Thankfully this has also been a wake up lesson to me that I need to have a consistent backup of my entire hard drive in case such a problem occurs again.

In hindsight I realize how lucky I was that I had the intuition to keep it awake the entire day of my presentation. Otherwise I would have appeared on stage with a dead computer and nothing to show! Yikes!

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