Just as if I needed further convincing that I’m in the wrong place, the yesterday’s work day was beyond terror. The sick feeling I get when walking in the building was met by a few brilliantly-placed and crafted processes (read: “who came up with this idea?”), personality conflict and overall frustration.

Then Murphy bears his wicked countenance. The (50-week-old) iBook’s hard drive has crashed. Like has happened so many times to me, it seems that the platters are bound or there has been a head crash.

“Ok, don’t panic. Bryan when’s the last time you backed up? Crap. Ok, what did we lose? Crap. The pictures, Quicken, music, my music, the custom scripts.”

Damage control proved more fruitful on yesterday’s iBook crash than it has in the past. After spending an hour in the refrigerator, the hard drive decided to spin up again long enough for me to pull a few really crucial files off.

After sitting cool again overnight, I was able to pull about 15 GB of additional data onto my external drive. I hope and pray that after sitting again all day, I’ll be able to pull the last 10 or so days of pictures from it (those are the ones I missed with my last iPhoto-to-DVD backup). After that, I’m going to drop it off to our local Apple Certified Repair place (of course we have no Apple Store). After that, I presume I’ll be without the iBook for about 3 weeks. Sigh.