This week hasn’t started out so great. A couple days ago while working on my Macbook, I suddenly got the rainbow beach ball and it wouldn’t go away. I switched to all my applications in turn and the beach ball persisted with nothing responding. I hit the power button and tried to turn it on again. The laptop came on, I heard the usual Apple “bong” sound, but the little Apple logo never came up, nor did it boot. I can’t boot from CD, and when I try hitting any of the Apple start commands, I get nothing. It just sits on the white screen forever till I get sad and turn it off.

Now I’ve had problems with this thing ever since I put in a new hard drive, but always before it would boot (eventually) and switching from battery to AC power, or vice versa, would help. Not this time. I tried popping out the hard drive and sticking it in my desktop to access in Linux, but I couldn’t get it to mount. It gave wacky errors and I couldn’t even mount it with the ‘force’ option. I think the drive is hosed, so I’m doing what I can to restore data from other places. I had a Time Machine drive which I’m now going to use as my laptop hard drive, once I can get its data copied onto my PC’s hard drive. To do that, though, I have to clear off space by backing up other stuff onto discs. Once I get the Time Machine drive copied, I’ll format it and reinstall OS X before sticking it back in my Macbook. Sigh.

Today, my usual route to work was at a stand-still from all the traffic, so I took an alternate route. As soon as I got onto one of the main bypasses in Lexington, I saw a bike cop flip his lights on and get behind me. I pulled over and, sure enough, he wrote a ticket for me doing 13 over the speed limit. After he had given me my ticket but before I could get back on the road, his partner pulled over someone else; I’m guessing they were targeting that area this morning. I’m going to opt for traffic school to reduce the fine and keep points from being added to my license.