Saturday

I was typing something up late on Saturday night when my computer froze. Usually, it’s just an application causing the stall but this time I had to turn the whole laptop off, and upon restarting it I came across this image:

I also heard the noise of the hard drive having difficulty, a clicking followed by a zap sound. Very unsettling.

I put the Mac OS X Leopard installation disc back in and took a look at Disk Utility, only to confirm what I thought - the hard drive was unreadable. All my stuff, now gone. Annoying to say the least, expensive too.

The Cause

I came across an article which shed some light on what caused the hard drive to fail. Unfortunately, I’ve since lost the link. It stated that when a MacBook is put to sleep, rather than continue running with a small amount of battery like a Windows machine would, it write your current status to the hard drive and then goes to sleep. But it needs between 10 and 30 seconds to do this, so it’s recommended that you leave the laptop to do it’s thing before moving it. That’s probably what I did wrong.

Time Machine

All is not lost though. Since upgrading to Leopard about a month and a half ago, the first thing I did was bought an external hard drive to link with Time Machine, Apple’s new backup software.

I regularly work with my laptop hooked up to a monitor in my bedroom, so I usually have it plugged into my Time Machine device too. Everyone knows they should back their stuff up, but honestly it’s a pain in the arse to do. Time Machine performs a smart backup of my whole hard drive every hour.

A quick trip to Mplex this afternoon, £40 down for a new hard drive and a quick click of ‘Restore from Time Machine backup’ and I was back in business about 2 hours later. All my programs installed, desktop exactly the same and all I lost was what I did between Friday and Saturday night. I’ve essentially got my computer back to what I was like on Friday. Can’t tell you how reassuring it is to know that if anything goes wrong again, all it’s going to cost is a new drive. I won’t loss anything.

I’m not one to complain (ok, not true), but Translink is one company I have a strong opinion against. I resisted the urge to call this post “Translink Pt II”, as two-parters seem to be the trend now, instead opting for creating an entire category called Translink, for ease of use in venting my rage in days to come. Here’s my latest pickle:

http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/local-national/nir-plan-to-cut-sunday-trains-14017813.html

In a nutshell, it’s been proposed that Translink cut it’s Sunday train services due to “high fuel prices”. How ridiculous is that? May I remind you people that in a small country such as ours, it make logical sense to have a single public transport provider (i.e. Translink), which means that if Translink stop running on Sundays there will only be a bus service available. And we all know how well the buses over here run.

The train service over here is dire as it is. Delays are ubiquitous, and despite buying these fancy new trains back in 2005 the train out to Jordanstown is still a bogging piece of scrap that whines louder than my iPod can cope with.

“Getting there is getting better” is Translink’s strapline, which I’m sure no one would agree with. Despite claims of huge success in recent years and a surge in customer satisfaction, this article quite clearly states that something is not going well at all.

I also heard this week that Translink are also considering cutting services after 10pm to reduce costs.

Isn’t it time that we got rid of this joke of a company and put somebody with a bit of common sense in charge? The train lines only cover half the country, and they’re talking about cutting costs. I despair.