Rui CarmoWell, it looks like I'm going to have my first Mac hardware support adventure. pastilha, my G3 iBook and faithful companion of many a night of coding since early 2003, packed up early in the morning with what seems to be a logic board failure (random horizontal striping on the LCD, system freeze), taking with it a small portion of my new code base and a few documents.
Fortunately, my aggressive replication strategy has limited the damage to a few hours/days of random file changes, so I've only "lost" a couple of important documents - I hope I can bring back the disk when I leave the machine for repairs, otherwise it's going to be a pain...
Murphy's Law, of course, has already reared its ugly head. As it so happens, my machine's serial number is within the range specified in the Expanded iBook Logic Board Expansion Program - which ended on March 18.
So I'm probably out of luck as far as a direct replacement is concerned, but with all the Intel hype (which, incidentally, Gruber has commented upon today), I won't be buying a new laptop until the dust settles (and even then, I had already slated any further upgrades for 2006).
The next step, of course, is to get it fixed. In further homage to Murphy, thanks to this week's holidays (and my upcoming trip to London the week after), scheduling a trip to one of the relatively meagre choice of authorized support centres in the Lisbon area is tricky to say the least. And, before you ask, there isn't an Apple store in Portugal. Yet.
So, all things considered, I'll probably be making my way to the local headquarters (which is some way out of town, in nearly the opposite direction I usually commute), in hope that it will speed up the repair process:
We'll see how it goes.
As always, since I have a strict budget for computing gear (all my hobbies have to be self-sustaning), concerned parties can consider donating towards the repairs.