Dear World,

Sorry for not writing. My laptop has been on the fritz for a few weeks now and I like to keep my writing saved in one place... my laptop. Sure, I could update from anywhere since this website has a web interface, but it was easier to just not write rather than have to save everything on a thumb drive and transfer it over when I got my laptop up and running again.

Just to keep you up to date, I sent my laptop off to Apple a couple of weeks ago because smoke started coming out of the air vents and the screen's backlight wasn't turning on. 3 days after I got my laptop back from DHL, the hard drive started clicking. Noisy hard drives are bad and my drive stopped working soon after the clicking started. Fortunately I had a backup so I didn't lose much of anything and certainly nothing important. I am very comfortable opening up laptops, so ordering a new drive and putting it in myself wasn't a big deal. I got my drive on Wednesday this week and was up and running that night. Hopefully I won't have any more issues with this thing because dropping $400 total on it for repairs wasn't very fun.

The only saving grace about the situation is that I purchased an iPhone last month. The day I was screwed out of my first N+ exam, I went straight to the Apple store and bought an 8GB iPhone 3G. It's a phone, first and foremost, so I haven't loaded it with tons of music (besides, Simplify Media has built an app that lets you share music libraries wirelessly), but the calendaring and internet functions have been extremely useful. My only major complaints about the phone are that native apps, like Safari, crash far too often and the GPS functionality is still really limited. I am willing to give it some time, though, since Apple is really good about fixing obvious bug issues.

Update: I've gone back and added a few posts for the time I didn't have my laptop. -JM