Contingency Plans are no Substitute for Little Brothers

I had grand plans of coming into work over the weekend and getting ahead on my work for the week. Those plans came to a grinding halt, however, when my beloved G5 wouldn't boot up. I spent hours trying to troubleshoot the problem and came to the conclusion that it was a major problem with either the power supply or the logic board.

The good news is that none of my work was in danger, but the bad news is that I had no way of getting to any of it because it was all stored on a pair of internal hard drives. I remembered that my brother had a near-identical G5 that he isn't using at the moment. I called him and he told me I was welcome to borrow it as long as I needed, while trying to repair my Mac.

He offered to bring the Mac and meet me halfway between Bay City and South Bend, so we settled on meeting up for lunch in Marshall (southwest of Lansing). We met up at Applebee's (it's the best sit-down restaurant near exit 36) and had a good time. Afterwards we loaded the G5 into my truck and I headed back to Bay City.

I spent the next two hours on the highway and the two hours after that stripping the hard drive and memory from his Mac and replacing it with the hard drives and memory from my Mac. For the most part, the transfer worked out perfectly. There were a couple of glitches, but they were minor and easily settled.

Once you add up the time I spent troubleshooting, driving, and repairing I probably lost about 8-10 hours out of a week when I could ill-afford the lost time. On the whole, though, I am grateful because were it not for my brother Kevin, my situation would have been much worse.

The moral of this story is that I need to have better contingencies in place for the future. I won't always be able to rely on help from Kevin because he would have to have a warehouse of unused Macs laying about and that's just not in the cards. I'm pretty good about backing up my data, but I need to be better about it. You'd think I would have learned my lesson when I lost a hard drive three months ago, but I am still lax in the backup department.

If you are the well-wishing sort, you might want to keep a good thought for my G5. I hope that the problem is the power source because that repair will only take a few hours of my time and about $150 for the replacement part. If it is the logic board, though, the machine is likely unsalvageable because the cost of a new logic board is only a little shy of what a new machine would cost.

One of these days, the blog will get back to the business of design. For now, though, I just want to send out a big thank you to my brother. Thanks, Kevin, you really came through for me. Maybe I'll name my next puppy after you or something. How does that sound?