Friday, July 9, 2004

Lightning Crashes - An Old iMac Dies Back from the dead!! Holy apocalypse, it's been a wild few weeks. I think it was June 19th that we got hit by lightning. Let me set the scene. (By the way, listening to Emmylou Harris' magnificent voice, from an NPR series, Creators at Carnegie. Listen here: http://www.npr.org/programs/creators/shows/2004/harris.html You want to listen to it too? Go ahead. I'll wait. Waiting... Waiting... Okay. We live in an apartment building in West Seattle. It's actually two four-story buildings, next to each other, with a little courtyard in the middle. Decks on every apartment. Well, the decks are falling apart from dry rot, and so the management decided they'd rebuild them. So our apartment is surrounded by scaffolding, which is pain in the neck enough. But we also happen to be one gigantic four-sided lightning rod. Which shouldn't be a problem, because Seattle doesn't getting winning sports teams or lightning. They got a freak storm a few weeks ago. Chloe (the cat) and I were awake at 2:00, watching the lightning transform the sky. (I think I was enjoying it more than Chloe.) Then, the following things happen: 1) A huge blast of lighting explodes the sky, and Chloe and I jump out of our skins. 2) The fire alarms in the building go off, screaming hypersonic wails. 3) R. (my beloved wife) wakes up screaming. I try to calm her down, but for just a second, I'm hyperventilating, and can't get enough air to talk. 4) We both realize the whining is the fire alarms. And it's not stopping. 5) Twenty minutes later (maybe longer), the manager is summoned and the fire alarms mercifully go off. We go back to sleep. 6) Four hours later, as R's getting ready to go to work, the power goes off. (Weird timing.) So the point of all this is that the lightning apparently took out my Ethernet port in my iMac. Everything else in the system works, but I have no Internet access. (Aha! No blog!) I call repair shops and they all tell me the same thing: if one port is fried, you have to replace the entire logic board. How much? About $400 and change. AAgghhh!!! It's a used computer, and so I decide to buy a brand new used computer. So three weeks later, we have a brand new lime-green iMac sitting in the living room. Yesterday, I took it to the heroic Mac repair guy at RE-PC (used computer shop). He does the brain transplant as I watch - take the 6 GB brain out of the new iMac, replace it with the 20 GB from the fried iMac. I reinstalled Panther last night, and I'm rockin' and rollin' again. I'll start throwing some rash opinions here shortly, but that's the update on where the hell I've been. Moral of the story: Unplug everything if there's a chance of lightning. Logic boards are expensive to replace. Emmylou Harris rules. And Emmylou Harris and Patty Griffin together... Please. I'm getting chills. 10:09:06 PM    comment []

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