Blogging and Apple

No sooner had I rattled on about not blogging, when I discovered a very good use for it:

The LaCie disk I use for backups stopped working. I was trying to remember when and where I had purchased it, and searched through my electronic bank account files. Nothing there. I hunted on my hard drive and Spotlight pointed to a number of blog pages. Hmmm... So I searched my blog. Aha, November 2007! And it was a mail order, so it was paid by credit card. I dove into my dead tree files and found the receipt.

LaCie is a good company, offering a five-year warrantee for its hard drives, so it's just a matter of sending it back to where I bought it. In the meantime, I decided to go see what the local Apple store has.

After years of barely realizing there was a personal consumer market for Apple products, Bergen has sprouted two Apple stores: One belonging to a Norwegian chain (Eplehuset - literally "apple house"), and one morphing from Bergen's oldest Mac seller, EDBergen, into a bona fide Apple Store. EDBergen has supplied me with Macs since I was introduced to them. In fact, the same salesman, Jan, who sold me (that is, my employer) a Mac IIci in October 1989, was in the store today.

I wandered around, picking out a surge protector, scanning the racks for other fun stuff, and then Jan (pronounced Yahn) showed me around the store, including the back where their technician sat (they do their own repairs), their little employee break room, the server room, etc. I ended up in Jan's office, he offered a cup of coffee, and I rediscovered one of the joys of a real store: Picking up the pretty boxes, actually holding them, and reading the blurbs on them. So I walked out of the store with the iLife/iWork '09 bundle and a Western Digital hard drive (which is very pretty and quiet). Yes, I'll get my LaCie back, and it will get to be an off-site back-up.

I also know, after a bit of hands-on in the store, that I want the 17" MacBook Pro.

The Apple store is in Bergen's so-called pedestrian mall, and across from it is a art nouveau/jugendstil brick building that originally housed Bergen's first department store about 100 years ago. Nice neighborhood!