And So It Goes

Any technology, sufficiently advanced, is indistinguishable from magic
- Arthur C. Clarke

For those of my fans (okay, fan--hi Karl!) who've been wondering what happened to me, it has to do with a slight accident involving a bowl of imported Campell's Chicken Noodle Soup and the keyboard of my Apple iBook. Unfortunately, the software and files necessary to maintain this weblog are installed on the local computer, not the server (not all of them, obviously, or how could you be reading this?), so I couldn't even leave a notice saying that I was out to lunch or gone to Bali or whatever. I'll be catching up on some stuff worth writing about over the next several days.

(Whether it's worth reading about will be--perhaps literally--an exercise for the reader.)

I've also downloaded 546 e-mails waiting for me--and immediately deleted 400 as spam. Oh the joys of the on-line life.

In any case, I finally took my chicken-souped iBook to the Apple-authorized repair place here in Tokyo on Friday. It took awhile to get because I wanted to first see if I could open up the laptop, clean off the gunk, and try to reboot it before spending money on professional help. By the time i found the time to do that, I discover that I had no idea how to open the thing without doing violence to it. So I called the Apple Japan English Support line and found out where the official repair center was in Shibuya.

To be accurate, I got the address of the official repair center in Shibuya: actually locating it was a whole new challenge, since street addresses in most of Japan follow a kind of coordinate system. (I discussed this in the earlier version of my weblog, where I discussed the meaning of the elements of my postal address. The relevant section can be found here.) So I left Shibuya Station, and the street maps were of little help since they were written in kanji (Chinese characters) and my notes from the phone conversation were, of course, in Roman characters. I wandered up and down the neighborhood for nearly an hour before I finally came across a police kiosk (koban) up on Dogenzaka Hill and asked for directions (well, mimed and pointed at my notebook). He pulled out the station's very detailed street atlas and found the building, which was, naturally, less than hundred meters from the train station, and thirty meters from the corner where I had turned left instead of right. So back I went.

I went up to the place and waited on the couch while four technicians at the counter dealt with various problems. After a short wait, I drew a gray-haired guy in a blue NCR polo shirt. It was a bit difficult at first, since I don't speak Japanese and he didn't speak English: we had to rely upon a telephone, connected to an English-speaking Apple Japan support person, passed back and forth. On the other hand, I didn't need to know Japanese to understand the air-sucked-through-the-teeth sound the technician made after he popped open the back of the case and took a look. "New computer," he said, pretty much exhausting his English. I looked, and the scorch marks were obvious.

So I have a toasted motherboard. Minimal repair cost ¥120,000. Minimal cost of new laptop, ¥149,000. Looks like I'll be without a laptop for awhile.

I now have an extra battery if I and when I replace this machine with the same model, and the Apple technician did, at least, take out the RAM and the 2.5-inch hard drive. I went to an electronics store in Akihabara Electric Town and bought a Firewire/USB case, with white leather case, for the hard drive, which is how I can access my weblog now: I plug this drive--which is the size and shape of my old Handspring Visor, or, for the less geeky among you, a package of small cigars--into one of the office computers, and voila, I have a virtual computer, with all my files, applications, e-mail, and preferences.

Which I find weird: I'm not a complete techno-idiot, but I find it passing strange that I can plug this small box into a computer (my desktop at home, a computer here at the office) and have everything be exactly the same. I'm used to thinking of the entire box--the tower, the laptop, what have you--as the computer and all its functions, complexities, and data, and now it--and maybe my life--is reduced to a cigarillo box? Maybe at heart, I am a still a spear-waving caveman, still afraid of this scary new "fire" thing.