OH MY GOD!

I cannot believe how incredibly lame Network Solution’s lack of content management methodology is.

They have a system called ImageCafé, which allows you some neat tools to organize web site page layout, create menus, and so on.

Only...

1. You have no users/groups, so you cannot share content editing authority with others.
2. You have to publish the entire web site, meaning that you cannot scale your site easily.
3. You only have three “versions” of your ENTIRE SITE. If you want to roll back before those three versions, SOL.
4. You have to commit EVERYTHING on the site. Which means that if any files got onto your site through other means in the /htdocs directory, it blows them away. FTP directories and file uploads? BLAMMO! Install Joomla? BLAMMO!
5. Network Solutions has no idea how to migrate users from ImageCafé to Joomla.
6. If you begin to transfer to Joomla, you CANNOT MAKE ANY CHANGES TO IMAGECAFÉ, or ALL OF JOOMLA IS DESTROYED.
7. Most people at Network Solutions Customer Service can’t even spell Joomla, never mind tell you why you want to install it.
8. Most of the people who do know what Joomla is are not really sympathetic to the fact that they have you over a barrel.

I have had this case open since September, when I first noticed that ImageCafé was blowing away this wonderful audio interview I did. Each time I restored the interview (which had to happen through FTP because of file site limits with the ImageCafé upload), any changes to the Web site via ImageCafé utterly destroy the subdirectory with the audio files.

This problem has been outstanding with no suitable resolution from Network Solutions. No migration path to Joomla. They didn’t even realize ImageCafé was doing this until I told them. At first they blamed me for doing something wrong. Then I repeatedly uploaded the file, changed something using ImageCafé, and lo! The files and subdirectories not put on the website by FTP were missing. Lovely.

The last time I tried to tackle this issue, we basically changed the Unix filesystem read, write, execute (rwx) permissions on the file, so that, theoretically, ImageCafé should not be blowing away the files or folders.

No dice. It blew them away still.

So for months, I have been wrestling with simply getting my web site to STOP doing this data-destructive behavior. Network Solutions has been a big network problem. It’s frustrating, embarrassing, and makes future business impossible and unstable.

Plus, even if I could get these files nailed up for now, I still need to open content management to other people. The organization needs to scale, and ImageCafé does not have any user-to-content level security. At all.

What sucks is that by going to Joomla, I’ll be losing the rather nifty ImageCafé page layout tools. Oh well. I’d rather make .css a bit more confusing rather than seeing my data get blown away over and over and over again.

The kind of people I usually talk to about this problem are Level 2 techs. First level phone techs are, for all intents, useless wastes of time other than people to type in a raw description of how things are broken. They have no practical experience with Joomla. Though they know it is available.

The Level 1 Techs pass me up to their supervisors. They also turn out, generally, to be not-so-hot. But usually after about 20 minutes to an hour of my time mostly wasted repeating the same problem as I have had since September, I get to talk to a Level 2 tech. About 50% of the time. Who is a person who generally understands my problem and utterly realizes that Network Solutions is simply Network ¬Solution (Nul- or Empty-of-Solutions). Or, more poetically, they are the Network Problem in the first place.

ImageCafé can be salvaged. It could be re-written to work with Joomla users/groups. It could be made a module of Joomla and/or Drupal. But as a Content Management System, it suxxors the hard rocks.

Three revisions... of the entire site? (wtf?) I’m used to making hundreds of changes on an individual WIKIPEDIA file. And then, if you have to recover? You might need to go back a dozen or two dozen revisions. Not only three. And this is just for ONE file.

So ImageCafé blows hard. And Joomla?

Joomla is interesting. But they won’t let you install it at the /htdocs root level. So... Um... Why not?

They say that it needs to go down at a lower level for some sort of “running as an application” reason. I am not sure they were very smart in their wrapping of it, and thus toss it under /htdocs/[something]/. You cannot have it be just /htdocs/. Which is annoying. It means that anything under /htdocs CANNOT go under a CMS.

Except for ImageCafé. Catch-22.

I have tried before to get Joomla up and running. About 12 times so far. Yet each time I get somewhat there, I’ve done things like, oh, touched a page through ImageCafé. It took me a few times before I realized that ImageCafé was what destroyed the entire Joomla directory. “wtf? Didn’t I do some Joomla work? Grrr... Alright... let’s start over.”

Once I realized what it was doing... I realized I was NEVER going to be able to use ImageCafé EVER, EVER, EVER again. If I even do so much as breathe hard on it, it will utterly overwrite and destroy everything in Joomla. An unrecoverable error.

I really cannot believe that Network Solutions, those brilliant people, are so idiotic as to think that ImageCafé is the end-all-and-be-all of a small business “solution.”

In fact, they aren’t. They are hard at work recoding some portions of ImageCafé based on negative feedback. I won’t say what I’ve heard so far, but it should be good when it is released.

However, again, ImageCafé is dead for me. It has to be dead. I cannot, ever, never, ever touch it. To do so will destroy — literally — everything I will do in Joomla.

So I cannot update the old site. I have to check in, manually, everything I already have done into Joomla before I can relaunch the site... which will only get me back to where I already am today.

Then, finally, I will be able to continue doing more work.

What a bizarre, stomach-churning, dead-endian “solution” this turned out to be. I got the site in August. I’ve had these problems since September. October. November. Now December. How long must this madness continue? I guess until I get my entire site manually “hupped” over to Joomla. A process I will have to invent myself since Network Solutions never came up with any scripts, process or methodology for change management from ImageCafé, their one web site management offering, to Joomla, their new offering.

What experiences have you had with Web “solutions” which put you over a barrel, or put your nerves over the edge? Or put your business into the red? Or bankruptcy?

8DaysOffline & Three Cups of Tea for Global Understanding

Please go to YouTube and Rate this video!

Thanks!

-Peter Corless.

Odyssey

Sometimes I feel as if my life is this book. Only... far longer.

-Pete.

Twitter? wtf?

Posted at Twitter.com

Peter · October 8 2008, 12:48 AM
This is what I DID:
Signed up to get connected with NetSolCares.

This is what I EXPECTED to happen:
- To achieve my purpose: Search for NetSolCares and get hooked in to their community.

- Learn what the heck this site is and does.

- Find answers about this place.

- Find out "what the big deal is."

- Use it intuitively and get explanations and help when it doesn't conform to expectations.

- Locate support Forums for more information.

- Get back to work soon.

This is what ACTUALLY happened:
I was confused. I got lost. I searched for far longer than I felt I needed to. I kept getting asked for my email address when I was just trying to find a SEARCH feature for other user accounts.

I FINALLY found NetSolCares after way too long, not by using the search feature, but just by truncating the URL and HAND TYPING IN "https://twitter.com/NetSolCares".

Then I got to the page and I asked myself, "What the hell?"

What was this Twitter thing for? Why was I told to come here? What was I supposed to do when I did get here? Where's the help?

I finally found an FAQ. It didn't answer my questions. Like...

- Why in the world would I use this social networking site over others?

- Why is Network Solutions telling people to use Twitter? What is the purpose of their Twitter account here?

- How can this synch with my cell phone or computer calendar so I don't need to dink with manual updates? I have to live my life, not "feed the beast" of the Internet.

- How could this interact with other social networking sites, Internet calendaring systems, or other applications so I don't need to keep coming here to tell people where I am?

- I've wasted far longer typing this in than I got utility value of using a "simple" application.

FINALLY: You left out the key question at the end of your "Request for Assistance," which is the REQUEST FOR ASSISTANCE!!!!!!

Like, where on this form does it say, "What would you like for us to do for you?" Or "Do you have any suggestions to make Twitter better?" Or "How can we help or be of assistance?"

- Pretend like you never used this site, and look at it with fresh eyes. It really doesn't explain itself too well.

- Add in a "request" question so that you are not just listening to people tell you about problems, but let them ask for their redress of grievances or allow them to offer suggestions for improvements.

- Actually have some pragmatic purpose to the universe. This was a waste of my time -- so far -- unless there's something about this site that I utterly don't get.

- Please contact me -- BY PHONE (650-906-3134) -- to prove to me this is an actual business that cares about me, so I actually might care enough about using this service again.

I have some questions about utility value and pragmatics of this service. I blog about the good, bad, and the ugly of services.

Unless proven otherwise, I'd have to rate this experience so far as either of the latter two categories.

Hope you see that as fair?

iPhone Sort of Working

The other day, I took my iPhone back into AT&T and Apple. Back-to-back. I finally got the iPhone working. Sort of.

• GPS Nominal: The GPS shows Latitude & Longitude. There was a third party app to download & install. It doesn’t come native. Also, the GPS only works in AT&T tower range. It is not really GPS, and doesn’t pick up the GPS satellite signals at all. Caveat emptor. Don’t venture into real wilderness and hope to survive with your iPhone.

• Email Inbound: Rather than get email via .mac (MobileMe), I am now getting it from SpamArrest. However, I can't really control the outbound address I am sending from. I would prefer if the email outbound used petercorless@mac.com, rather than @spamarrest.com. I don’t want to dick with it, so I just don’t use it for email.

• Touch Screen still Touchy: The touch screen only interacts with fingertips and skin. No stylus. No pen or pencil point. Just a human touch. Which means it is as responsive as trying to steer a car wearing two basketballs for gloves. So I don’t use it to type with.

• Phone Coverage Sporadic: Sometimes I get a signal. Many times I don’t. At Wolf Camera, showing my iPhone to Scott, who works at the Apple Store at Stanford on alternate days, I showed him my phone. He called it from his own iPhone. Side-by-side. It went straight to voicemail. Not even a ring. “That shouldn’t do that,” he sagely opined. I quite agreed.

• No Built-in Help: The product had no built-in tutorial or help. It felt very 1984 all over again. “How do I use this?” “That is a very good question. Guards, arrest this man!” Finally I went to the Palo Alto Store, for the umpteenth time it seems. I got a Bluetooth headset which I will likely lose in the first week of ownership, and a clerk showed me how to stop some of the annoying “features” like shutting down within 60 seconds.

• No SD chip slot: What the...? Who thought lack of expandibility and portability of data was a good idea?

• Lack of a single-ear bud: They gave me this cute 2-ear bud, like I as going to use it as an MP3 player. I already got an iPod. 2 actually. But since I spend so much time dinking around trying to get my iPhone and my Mac and my Treo to work, I haven’t had time to actually get any more technological devices set up. Anyway, for a phone, I have no desire for 2 earbuds. Especially when I want to do hands-free driving. I want ONE ear bud, thank you. Apple doesn’t sell any. So they sold me a Bluetooth ear thingy. Which has no tether so I’ll likely drop it and lose it like the Bluetooth thingy I found outside Alberto’s in Mountain View the other week ago.

• Camera has really bad delay: I keep taking pictures about 3 seconds after I hit the button. Hence I tend to take a lot of blurry photos that do not even show what I had hoped to take pictures of. I have to stop..... and then wait.... and then wait more.... and then click .... and then I wait... and then I wait... and then it shows me the photo. Then it immediately shoves the picture away so I have to leave the camera-view to go to a gallery of a sort to delete bad shots. Then back again to the camera. Innacurate? Tedious? Blurry? Meh.

So the iPhone sort of works. I got a call on it today. Yay? I also had to make calls on it outbound when my old Treo 650 was dying (more on that in another article).

I’ll stick to the Treo, thank you. I upgraded to the 755P, after a torture-of-the-damned voyage into Microsoft Mobile hell and back with an 800W (more about that also in another article).

Simply put, the iPhone is far from the whiz-bang I had hoped it to be. Since I’ve wasted so much time dinking around just trying to get it to work AT ALL, I still haven’t gotten to use Evernote yet.

On a scale of Suckfulness, where 0 is “It doesn’t suck at all,” and 10 is “Please, first let me put my own eyes out, and then suffer to die, to punish myself for buying this turd of a product,” the iPhone is about a 4. It is painful to use, but not sufficiently painful enough to return to the manufacturer.

But in a Joy-to-use scale, it is also only a 4. I have not felt compelled to carry it around. I often just let it drain its batteries and sit on the shelf. “Oh well.” It is as impressive to me as my first Apple QuickTake camera. i.e., not-so-bad, not-so-good.

Maybe if I could start using Evernote I’d care more about it. That means I actually have to get all my technology products to work in harmony, and not act as boat anchors and paperweights.

Thinking about one thing more: the lack-of-touch-screen is going to be problematic in extreme cold weather. You have to take off any gloves, since you have to use a fingertip and you can’t use a stylus. Since you’ll be colder, your hand will shake more and be less effective in accurately touching a keyboard character. I keep thinking about New York City this Christmas, and am not looking forward to it.

-Pete.

Sprint is killing me... 1 Oct 2008

Anna
Employee # 889376

• Called back Sprint @ 3:50 PM~
• Waited so long on hold I called down to Dawn Tuethorn to let her know I could not get down to St. Jude's today.
• I am late in going to San Francisco. At risk of not making engagement in SF tonight.
• Waited on hold until 4:00 pm
• Explained situation within 1 minute and was put back on hold.

CelleBrite Machine
• Sprint Store
• 5194 Stevens Creek Boulevard, San Jose
• Should not be a charge
• Format? How to get it into my Macintosh?
• Windows format for 800W.
• How do I get it to my Mac?
• Checking
• Not sure

"Quiet Riot Act" — explaining back story, again, and asking, again, to get this escalated and resolved.
• 4:20 PM - Are you telling all the Mac users to just abandon Sprint and go with AT&T
• 4:26 PM - Thank you for helping me. This is not "Your" problem, but it is a problem
• 4:35 PM - Still doesn't work with Mac
• 4:42 PM - No total Quality Management; conformance to customer expectations
• 4:47 PM - Account services please
• 4:50 PM - still waiting on hold for Account Services. Got Anna's Employee #.

Rosalee
• 4:53 PM Start the story again
• 4:57 PM - Can I have a Centro? I'll go pick it up tonight at a store. It's only $79.99. Do I need to buy it? This other phone, 800W doesn't synch and the 650 is dying. I just need a phone please. We can fix the lack of Mac-800W synch later. Please.
• 5:01 PM - Get phone for thirty (30) days, then return.
• 5:01-5:06 PM - Can you guarantee me the phone will be usable as desired in 30 days? Mac-to-800W Synch? Can you just say yes to a Centro? Can we turn this around and get this working so people don’t just abandon Sprint and go to AT&T? Do you really just want people to buy iPhones and go to AT&T?
• 5:06 PM - Supervisor, please.
• 5:08 PM - On hold. Waiting for supervisor.
• 5:12 PM - Called Yelena. Missed appointment in San Francisco. Still on hold. Getting transferred to Supervisor. "Customer" = One who gets one own way.

Jay
• 5:13 PM -
• 5:17 PM -
• 5:20 PM -
• 5:24 PM - Escalation of issues.
• 5:26 PM - Forward to direct manager; forward to client services manager. Then out of his hands.
• 5:27 PM - Is there a ticket #? How do I track it to resolution? Send an email.
• 5:30 PM - Loaner capability Centro. But not really. No dice.

Marketing
• Will you make a deal?
• "I will escalate to my manager, then client services manager."
• Call me back in 8 Days. We got a deal.
• You're killing me.
• 5:38 PM - Thank you for calling Sprint. Have a good day. Bye.

SpamArrest

HELP ME! PLEASE CALL! URGENT! IMPORTANT!

Your service is really messing up my mail.

1. Email getting deleted randomly w/o archive.

2. SPF constantly being applied to mail making it unusable -- even my own OUTBOUND mail. What?!?

3. You have no phone #, so real-time problems cannot be solved. I found a phone # by doing an NSLOOKUP.

4. Your company's email "solution" has caused me significant business and personal problems.

5. There needs to be a better way of doing business than this. Some form of real-time premium phone support. Email is vital. Why do you think I am paying extra for spam filtering?

6. I reserve all consumer rights and rights of free speech. I will blog this issue (8daysoffline.blogspot.com), tell others about it, contact the BBB, and either recommend or disrecommend SpamArrest based on the feedback I get, or lack thereof. I might even write a book given the craziness email has caused me. There would be an entire chapter on SpamArrest. The good, the bad, and the ugly.

Please contact me! BY PHONE! 650-906-3134

-Peter Corless.
petercorless@mac.com
650-906-3134
petercorless.blogspot.com
8daysoffline.blogspot.com

Into and out of the Rabbit Hole

This is the true story of how my Macintosh ate Sleeping Beauty.

A couple of years ago, I don’t remember exactly when, my Macintosh started eating my email.

For many years, I had so much email I just ignored it. Thousands and thousands of emails. Spam. Business correspondence. Personal friends. Non-profits I founded or worked for. Non-profits asking me for donations. People trying to send me money.

It was too much. Literally, I let over 10,000 messages pile up, and it kept piling up.

I stopped reading email.

So I got SpamArrest. I got a new Mac.

Slowly, but surely, I started emailing people again. People started getting in contact with me again.

Because of other emotional scars I bore because of my c. 2000-2002 personal meltdown, I often got emails but was an utter slacker. Even to this day I have more emails inbound than outbound. Time management and email management is a critical, urgent, and important issue in modern communications.

For a man who used to pride himself for riding the crest of the tech wave, I have to admit I went under. This blog is called "8 days offline." Yet I was unplugged from most of the day-to-day world of reality for years.

Where was I?

I was in cyberspace playing games. Peter Panning. Not growing up.

I had enough in the bank to pay my rent for years. If people played Castle Marrach (c. 2001-2006, off-and-on), or perhaps World of Warcraft (Nov 2007 - Aug 2008) they'd find me. Otherwise, mail and email piled up like trash, or eTrash.

Since 2006, more or less, I have been on the wobbly road to data and information recovery. Getting in touch with friends again. Starting new businesses. I still have more dollars than sense, so I don’t “need” a job. Though I can see the end of that runway. I'll need to take off within the next year, and get one of these enterprises of mine, for-profit or non-profit, into a stable orbit.

Today, I saw an email from a friend, who I will identify only as Sleeping Beauty. Oh! I was so glad to hear from her!

Then the Mac ate my email. Gone.

Nooooooooo!!!!

It happens. It's been happening ever since I got my email started up again. Perhaps it was eating them the whole time.

An email will pop up at the top of the queue. Then vanish! I hit no key. I did nothing. Just.. poof! As suddenly as it appeared. No viruses as far as Norton can tell. No restarting the Mac does nothing. I’ll give a hairy eyeball to anyone who makes lame-brained suggestions for solutions. This is a difficult problem to detect, or I would have resolved it by now.

Is it my Mac OS? Is it the Apple mail client? Is it SpamArrest, my email spam-scraper? Is it the MobileMe (aka .Mac) email infrastructure that somehow retroactively killed it?

When you know that Sleeping Beauty is a lovely, lovely friend, and you'd like to get in touch with her after all these years, and when you want to archive her tender, sweet, friendship letters to you, you do what you can to get them back, don't you?

If this kept happening to all sorts of important correspondence, you'd want to solve the problem before you lost more precious, invaluable treasures, yes?

I called Apple.

The IVR failed again. These were the terms it could not understand:

Macintosh OS X ("Ecks")
.mac (“dot mac”)
Mac.com (“Mac dot com”)
Mail

None of them were recognized. The IVR kept trying to suggest I had a problem with an Apple Color Monitor. Uh... no.

Finally I got to speak to a human. Chris, he's a nice guy. He had an easy laugh, and offered no resistance to helping me.

He could see why I'd want to get back in touch with a Sleeping Beauty, and why one would call to get this sort of thing cleared up immediately.

Chris also thought it was funny how this was all happening, and the sort of oddball, humorous, but positive process it was. If we ever turn this into a book, Chris deserves a picture on page 118 or thereabouts as an example of someone who intuitively gets the concept of helping the customer achieve their goals.

To be fair, I am not surprised at the technical problem, nor am I surprised that Apple has good people like Chris to answer the call. I myself worked at Apple 1991-1992 on the System 7 AnswerLine. I am a lifelong Apple fan because of how they treat me as a customer. I owe a great chunk of my professional career, my personal fortune in life, and my happiness to the Apple Macintosh computer.

When I came out here in 1989, I tracked down Guy Kawasaki at ACIUS, where he worked at the time. He introduced me to his beautiful wife, and I shook his hand to thank him for writing The Macintosh Way. I still have that book on my shelf.

Part of what I am driving at in 8 Days Offline is that spirit. The good-natured, positive, progressive human contact component of one’s business. It is the holistic yet quintessential element of the overall product and support process.

Like I said, though, here, the ideal failed. I did not get IDd with the right product, and so I did not get routed to the proper team at Apple. But with Chris, I got to the right guy!

He understood it was not in the Apple IVR, and honestly admitted there had been a few problems with the IVR other customers had commented on.

I offered to work for Apple to help solve the problem. “For today, the first call is free!” I asked him to take down my email and phone in case anyone wanted to get back in touch with me.

Meanwhile, he succeeded in one more way. When I asked for a Ticket number, he took about one minute and then gave me Case ID 105306592.

I also told him an expression I learned from Paula Montgomery, a Customer Service manager at Cisco Systems. She was also, briefly, my roommate in Newark, CA.

“You're killing me smalls!”

It is a quote from the movie, “The Sandlot.” Chris laughed when he heard the expression. He remembered the movie too. I loved it.

Paula used to use it all the time, when we'd have to call Manufacturing to get something straightened out. Or when a process had a small failure we could get cleared up easily if we could get someone to just make the change, but someone was giving us a sort of “I didn’t say Simon Says” no-can-do.

“You’re killing me, Smalls!” was her way to make it a bit of light humor. Suzanne Vega, in more earnestness, has the line, “It’s so small to you, it’s so large to me. If it’s the last thing I do, I’ll make you see.”

How often in life are problems so small for one person, but so significant for another?

This was the issue with me losing an email from Sleeping Beauty. “So what?” others can say. It was not a million dollars. No. No lives were lost in the misplacement of the email. No nations crumbled and no species were directly extincted by the scattering of those electrons.

Yet it is part of a low-grade fever of miscommunications that can frustrate people and prevent communications. After all, I have spent more real time documenting this problem here on 8 Days Offline than it took to read the email before it poofed out of existence.

I am sure I can cobble together how to get in touch with my friend — this time — yet I can clearly recall other emails I lost recently. It keeps happening. Like a demon in my hard drive.

At this point, I want to exorcise my Macintosh, rather than exercise my demons, to make my operating system safe for Sleeping Beauty.

WoW. My Return Key Broke...

From November 2007 to July 2008 I played a lot of WoW.

Like... A lot.

I was probably putting in more hours into the World of Warcraft than most people put into their full-time jobs. Over that period, I raced to Level 70 with two characters and created two more on my roster. Tons of PvP. Epic Season 2 gear. Tons of PvE, too. Awesome Badge of Honor gear. Was it the best gear in the game? Not really. But for someone who had played less than a year, it was real damn good.

Truth in advertising: My frenetic, addicted rate of play was like a “burning crusade” to get my characters up as far and as fast as possible.

Over time, I joined the raiding guild Demise on the Aggramar server. A great guild: strong leadership, good friends, and a lot of fun. If anyone plays WoW on that server, is a mature player who is serious about raiding, and has a Level 70 on their roster, I recommend to look into Demise.

We cleared Karazhan. Gruul’s Lair. We were making our practice runs and forays into Serpentshrine Cavern. Lots and lots of Daily Heroics.

For those in the world who are utterly unfamiliar with the World of Warcraft, that is alright. Stay calm. “Don’t panic!”

Just know these are the Major Leagues of the World of Warcraft. The Big Kahuna battles. Five-man heroic teams. Ten-man raids. Twenty-five man raids. Forty-man raids. It is much like joining the military. A company-at-arms. Squad-level and platoon-level action. Brothers (and sisters) in arms from all around the world. I was near instantly friends with people from the US, Canada, Trinidad and Columbia. I even made a real-world friend here in the San Francisco Bay Area. It was great to talk to all these people from all these different walks of life. Together, in a chaotic symphony of bloodshed and magical explosions, we’d tear apart some big bad monster and save the world.

But suddenly, the world was over.

At least for me it was.

Only the World of Warcraft. The real world was still fine.

Alas! My trusty Macintosh broke. The return key was kaput. No matter how often or how hard I hit return, it never did anything. Everything entered stayed on a single line of text. That sort of made writing documents difficult. I couldn’t enter a URL, because the browser didn’t accept the carriage return. (Though I could select that little green arrow beside the URL field in Firefox.)

It was really awkward to type.

On top of that, the right arrow key was apparently broken too. It was as if some invisible pinky finger kept it constantly depressed even though I never touched it. Because of this, in the World of Warcraft, my characters spun in place to the right constantly. Turning and turning like a whirling dervish.

After a bit of testing, I discovered if I clicked on the left arrow and also kept it depressed, I would straighten out. The left-and-right effects balanced out. Even so, it was like having a car out of alignment. I constantly drifted to the right.

As a warrior-class “tank” in the game, it was hazardous to play with me. My character was unreliable and could go into an uncontrollable spin at any time. How can I protect the other characters if I cannot control my own motion and direction? I was a hazard to their virtual lives.

Quite literally, because of my Mac’s mechanical failures, my WoW characters seemed depressed, spinning dizzily out of control and had no hope of returning!

So I did the only merciful thing I could do: I brought my MacBook Pro in to the Apple Store in Palo Alto for repair.

At the Genius Bar, I asked how long it would take to get my Macintosh repaired. They were a bit vague, since they’d have to get the whole keyboard replaced. Maybe even test the motherboard. It was all fine with me. I knew I had needed to take a break from WoW at last. I had played it out. Not to the extreme end of “End Game Content,” but that I was content with what I had played so far. I could take it or leave it at this point. So, I left my Mac in the hands of the powers-that-be.

As they say in the Grail Legends, I “let the reins drop free,” and surrended to where the fates would lead me. It was liberating. After I checked my Mac into computational rehab, I walked out into the sunshine of a brilliant California summer.

I would not get my Macintosh back for 8 days.

This is the story of how my life changed over that period, one day at a time. When it was over, I had committed my life to a new path.

Just imagine what you might do, if this had happened to you.

Me? I was happy as a clam. I had a smile on my face, and a plan in my head.

I'll tell you more soon.