Murphy's law and it's corollaries dictate that not only will things that can go wrong will go wrong, but they will do so at the least possible convenient time. Thus it was that at the end of April as I was getting ready to transition to a few months of full-time travel Apple's Mail app decided to head south. The main symptom was an incredible use of memory. I could launch Mail and a short time later not only would all 8GB of RAM in my machine be swallowed up but it would be using 20GB more on disk for swap space. All and all a totally unusable situation.

Sometimes it is hard to know which thought would be a better lead. There is the great news today that the great folks over at The Omni Group have decided to make several of their titles freeware. On the other hand the personally notable part of this is how procrastination paid off. Last weekend I spent quite a bit of time putting together some screencasts (they're not yet published which is a story for another day) and found how great OmniDazzle is for creating screencasts. There is plenty of extra fun stuff that isn't all that useful in it, but there are a few features for highlighting things on the screen that are supremely beautiful. So while I was quite thrilled with OmniDazzle I hadn't quite managed to get the laptop and wallet together for the necessary routine to make the purchase.

At the end of June I ordered a [amazon title B000YQWQ4I]. I've had the previous version of the drive for a couple of years and it just rocks. They are a little more expensive than other drives but it's loaded with features from a great heat sink, leather carrying case and a triple interface. The goal was to get it before the July 4th weekend and get some data loaded for the OSCON trip later in the month. Everything looked good and the drive arrived a day earlier than scheduled. Things were busy but I plugged it in a couple of times and then finally sat down to load it up. This was the third time I'd used the drive. When I came back to the computer the drive wasn't responding. After rebooting the computer didn't see the drive. Using several computers verified that the drive was in fact dead. Plug in any of the three interfaces and it wouldn't spin up. The light was on but the drive wasn't spinning for anything.

So on July 8 I went to the G-Technology website and created a ticket. Late the following day I got an email with return instructions and the following information about what to expect:

As soon as we receive the drive, we will diagnose the problem and either
repair it or send you out a replacement.
Turn around time is estimated at
a) Ok To Erase: five to ten working days after we check in your drive or
b) Save Data drives require ten to fifteen working days after we check in
your drive for service.

Here's a quick random thought. As has been pointed out on some other blogs one of the shortcomings of the Time Capsule is that it only protects against some kinds of needs for data recovery. One could add a little bit more protection without sacrificing the convenience by swapping time capsule's with one's neighbor and having your backups live at their house and vice versa. This only works for people in houses close enough for it to happen and doesn't protect against all ills like a flood wiping out the neighborhood but would likely provide some protection against a house fire... of course the resulting physical insecurity of all your data means you have to really trust your neighbor.