It was tragic to hear this week about the death of Steve Jobs. What an amazing inventor, businessman and communicator. He really made a lot of advances in the world today and many of his inventions are helping us in our ministry to work more efficiently and with less time staring at blue screens and syntax errors. One could even say he helped advance the Gospel, though he never believed it himself.
We use two Apple computers, an iMac and a MacBook. Neither are new, but both are vital parts of our ministry. We use them to communicate with supporters, write email, bookkeeping, flight scheduling, publishing safety data, presentations, inspections, research, networking, Skype, photos, videos editing, weather, etc etc… In other words, we really depend on our computers.
That is, until a couple weeks ago. I remember distinctly when it all started. After returning from a long trip to Luzon we found our iMac unable to boot up. Through the display’s backlight I could see fog and knew that our computer was in trouble in the tropics. After leaving the computer on for 24 hours in “boot up mode” it finally warmed up enough to dry out. It booted up but has never been the same. It would often crash without warning and without any discernible pattern. These crashes became more and more frequent until finally it wouldn’t boot any longer.
I was sad at the loss of the computer and saw it as merely a major financial hurdle for us at this point in our lives. I wasn’t worried about losing data or how long it might take to get the data back. I am fanatical about backups and keep two redundant copies made by two separate programs on hand all the time. One backup occurs hourly, the other occurs weekly. It’s a good system, but as often happens, I ran out of hard drive space for doing good backups. To get a large enough drive here is prohibitively expensive and in the end you question what quality you’re really getting. So, I found a good deal on a drive in the US and had it shipped here. Then I got busy and a few months went by without doing my redundant backup – only the hourly ones.
I still wasn’t concerned. I began troubleshooting the computer and the backup was working fine. Then a funny thing happened – our neighbor started welding and when he does our whole house’s power surges like crazy. You can actually hear the 60Hz hum in the walls. I’m not sure if it was the power surges, or the way in which the computer gave one final “crash” but whatever it was, the backup drive lost its identity and was never to be recognized by a computer again. This has set us back even further than we already were. I lost some important documents I was working on and weeks of work on other projects that can’t be recovered. Moreover, we’re down to using a 5+ year-old laptop as our primary computer and it has a tiny hard drive…not good for bringing it all home to the States with us.
We are reminded of how fleeting things are here and how we need to make sure that the things we are truly relying on are eternal or at least not plugged into the Philippines’ power grid. The tropics has no concern for expensive things, no favorites between Macs or PCs, new or old – it destroys them all equally. It’s quite remarkable really.
Edward Dismukes says
Brian,
After you’ve been stateside a couple of weeks, please call me. I want to know two things. First, how has the Honda EU2000 performed and, second, have you gotten a replacement Apple?
Edward
Mobile, AL