Lost in the Cloud

I’m beginning to think the more gizmos and applications Apple develops to boost the power of Mac computers, the less I am able to keep up with them. Yesterday was a case in point. I went for my weekly One-to-One training session at the Apple store, spent a dizzying hour exploring the world of MobileMe, and left feeling less than brilliant.

When I bought my new Mac laptop, I paid an additional $99 for 52 private training sessions with a Mac genius. I can ask any question or focus on anything Mac-related and get the undivided attention of a walking, talking, human Mac manual. It’s a great concept, but before I knew it, my year was over. Unfortunately, I was still in Apple la-la land in terms of understanding the secrets hidden in my computer. So, I re-upped for another year.

If I didn’t have a little notebook to keep track of the steps in each process, I would remember nothing. MobileMe is amazing, if you know how to use it. It stores data, photos, movies, and applications. It synchronizes calendars, e-mails, and files on my Mac computers. It makes huge files and photos available to anyone. It has a simple website design application. And it has a purely apple invention: “the cloud.” Somewhere, in Apple's obscure website, it even has a help menu. I keep meaning to bookmark that page.

The cloud—otherwise known as iDisk—is a brilliant invention. It is where everything is stored, like an external hard drive in the sky. I can picture all my little files flying up to the cloud to be safely tucked away or synced with my other files so that I will never lose anything. I was a little disappointed to learn that the cloud is merely Apple’s cyberspace server, where I am essentially renting space, like a storage unit. But I choose not to dwell on that.

I could spend weeks learning about MobileMe, and I probably should. It’s a great tool and probably not half as complicated as I’m making it sound. I think the problem is that I ask how to do some little task and end up going through 17 steps to do it without ever figuring out where it fits in the MobileMe puzzle. I think that’s called inductive thinking, but I am a deductive thinker. I have to start with the big picture —what does MobileMe do? How is it organized? What are its parts? How does each part work?—as opposed to using a magnifying glass on one isolated function.

I think that was what you call an “aha moment.” I have been going at the whole thing backwards, starting with a single element instead of the whole program. I can’t wait to tell my Mac genius what I’ve known forever but just remembered—how I learn new information.

Mac User from Hell

The mother of all storms blew through St. Louis yesterday. It knocked down power lines, closed highways, left whole blocks dark, and interrupted my Internet access. You would think I would have figured out when my electricity went off that, perhaps, just perhaps, when I rebooted and couldn’t connect to my website, e-mail, or iDisk (my cyber backup system up there in the Apple’s private cloud), that it might have had something do with cable being knocked out by the storm. I believe the appropriate word here is Duh!

But, no; I just went crazy unplugging and replugging little black boxes, running around the Apple/MobileMe website to no avail (you can only get there on Safari, not on Firefox), and calling every Apple tech supportnumber on my list. Thank God, these guys are all hired for their patience because I am the Mac user from hell. Everything that goes wrong pitches me into panic mode. Ohmygod, __________ isn’t working. I think I’ll go ballistic. (Should one confess to such things on her blog? Well, I’m probably not alone in this form of insanity.)

The more little gadgets and capabilities I own, the worse it gets. Once upon a time, I had a little box called a Mac SE, which gave way to ever bigger boxes and then back down in size to just a monitor and then to even smaller MacBooks. The littlest Macs are iPhones and iTouch/iPods, but I haven’t gone there yet. There’s no telling what could go wrong with something I can hold in my hand.

So, after much teeth gnashing and nail biting, my cable is back up, my Internet connections are working, my junk mail box is full again, and my iDisk is back in its cloud. What more could one ask, except maybe for the sun to shine on a weekend, since it is June; and, at this rate, I will never get a tan. But I digress.

Really, at the moment, until the next storm, it’s all good.

What to Do When Your Hard Drive Dies

Like so many things you don't want to think about, having your hard drive crash is probably high on your list. You may know someone who lost everything (so to speak) and ever after became a nut about backing up files in six different places. But, until it happens to you, you just don’t believe it ever will. Then, one day for no discernible reason, you turn on your computer, and nothing happens. Nada. No familiar whir of start-up sounds. No sudden appearance of your overcrowded desktop. Just plain nothing.

You reboot and wait. Same nothing. Uh oh. You have a problem. Just how big a problem depends on several factors. If this is your only computer, it’s big. If you didn’t back up everything on it before it crashed, it’s huge. If you don’t have an extended warranty policy, like AppleCare for Macs, it’s expensive. At the very least, it’s annoying, frustrating, and time consuming.

I have personally experienced all of the above scenarios and the emotions they engender. The panic attack that follows a hard drive crash is indescribable, as is the feeling of relief when the computer EMT restores my data long enough to move it to another computer while my original hard drive slips into oblivion.

Even under the best of circumstance (that’s an oxymoron if I ever heard one), the whole affair is a pain in the neck. It just happened again, so I know. My laptop hard drive died. I took it to the Apple store. “Yup, it’s dead,” the guy at the genius bar told me. I whipped out my AppleCare box, which seemed to suffice. “OK,” he said. “Give me an hour, maybe less.” It turned out to be less. “Here’s what you do,” he instructed. "Plug your fire wire into both computers. Restart the source computer. Go do something else for a while. Everything from your desktop will load onto your laptop.” And it all came to pass, just as foretold.

Fantastic — except for figuring out how to reset the wireless access to the Internet, the missing latest versions of software that had been on the laptop but not the desktop, and anything else I didn’t know was the only file for something irreplaceable. Much hair pulling and expressive mumbling later, I think I am functioning again.

OK, here’s the advice part: Back up. Back up. Back up. Not too original, but worth repeating. Back up to a separate external hard drive. Back up from one computer to another (if you have two). Back up to iDisk (otherwise known as the Cloud), if you have a Mac. Back up to some other cyber storage place if you have a PC. Think of it this way: If your hard drive crashes, you have all that stuff somewhere else. If you house burns down (God forbid), you still have all that stuff, except that now it’s up there, somewhere in space.

Final words. Back up every day!

And the winner is ... Mac, of course

After a two-and-a-half-week struggle with a borrowed PC, I did what I should have done at the outset: I bought a Mac laptop. It looked like an impulse purchase, but it really wasn’t. I had checked out every model at the Apple store in Jacksonville, typed on the key boards, peered at monitors, researched software to determine how much hard drive space I would need, compared prices, and chosen my color scheme. I was ready.

Before I even finished unpacking, I drove to the mall and plunked down my credit card. My teacher’s discount didn't amount to much, but I got a free printer/scanner/copier and an iPod that holds 2,000 songs. What more could a committed Mac lover need, except perhaps software? And that was where the trouble started.

In order to install my software (which I own legally, complete with licenses and serial numbers), I would need to do a “migration,” which involved bringing in my desktop computer and hooking it up to the new laptop. In retrospect, that would have been the best course of action; but I was tired, the desktop Mac was awkward to carry, and the whole process seemed like too much trouble. I wanted a simpler solution. What I got instead were four trips to the Apple store, hours of waiting around while the techs tried various other approaches, and a rapidly deteriorating disposition.

In the end, of course, they prevailed. And, when I say they, I mean an entire team of Mac experts who would not give up until they solved this knotty problem. They were so genuinely happy when they handed me my new, fully functioning MacBook, the whole event felt like a party.

Mac owners are fanatics, I know. We simply don’t understand why anyone would own anything else. From our very first one (mine was the little box model), we are forever hooked. We extol its virtues to anyone who will listen. Can you imagine anyone waxing poetic about his Dell or Gateway? I can’t.