Wednesday, June 15'th: After the Vancouver Canucks lost to the Boston Bruins, there was shock added to my disappointment, when a few idiots began to start riots in Vancouver, getting some others to join in without thinking.
I felt pretty bad that night.Thursday, June 16'th: I was starting to feel better again, but in the afternoon, we got a phone call, that my dad had an accident!
He had been doing some nailing on the outside of a building at my brother's farm while standing on a sawhorse on top of a pallet that had been hoisted on a forklift, when he fell around 12 feet to the ground, breaking his collarbone and one rib, and suffered a severe concussion! He was in the hospital for around a week before he came home, which has put him out of commission for a while. So, that spoils our summer vacation plans, but we are glad he wasn't hurt worse, or killed! So, once again, I felt pretty bad that night.Friday, June 17'th: That evening, when I was clicking on a picture file of some sundews I took a few years back, the thumbnail took longer than usual to appear.
After that, things started getting worse, with my iMac slowing down to a crawl! Applications started to take forever to run, so I did a warm restart. It took over 5 to 10 minutes to reboot! I figured something was wrong, and thought it may have had something to do with a software update I had made earlier that evening. I shut the computer down and did a cold reboot, and the hard drive clicked away several times, before a picture of a folder with a question mark appeared in the center of the screen! The computer couldn't find my operating system, OS X Snow Leopard! I shut the computer down and went to bed, planning on calling the support hotline in the morning. Again, I felt pretty bad that night!Saturday, June 18'th: The computer was working perfectly normally when I booted it up in the morning, and figured that the glitch was worked out by the reboot. I decided to wait and see if anything happens again before taking it in for servicing. No problems that evening, either.
Sunday, June 19'th: That evening, while browsing the web as usual, I heard the hard drive give a loud click, similar to the sound some appliances make when they are warming up. I started to wonder, and decided to check the photos again. Once again, the slowdown occurred with an ever increasing time lag between doing something on the computer and it happening, and then it seemed to stop altogether! I wasn't even able to even do a system shutdown, because it was not responsive! I had to just power it down manually. I seemed to recall hearing the hard drive give a louder than normal click when I had shut the computer down a night or so before the first time it happened.
Monday, June 20'th: I tried rebooting the computer in the morning, and got the folder with the question mark again.
We took the computer down to our local Apple store, and they took it to Kelowna for servicing. I found out later that my AppleCare protection plan was only a month away from its 3 year expiration date, so the repair was for free! 
Several days later, the computer came back, with a new hard drive, because the technician said that the old one was toast. He spent the following weekend trying to get the data off of it, but it just wouldn't work.
So, 3 years of files I had acquired have been lost! Sinking videos and photos that I had erased from my camera memory cards after transferring them to the computer, were lost 
, although I can get a few back from the net, where I uploaded some. I was amazed at how many things could go wrong in such a short period of time! I felt that the data was still intact on the platter, but just the electronics were failing, but to repair it would have required a special company that could charge thousands of dollars for data recovery. So, that HD was going back to Apple for recycling. Since I had to start over with a clean slate, I decided to see if I could soften the blow somewhat by starting with an even larger, faster clean slate.
I had been eyeing the newer iMac computers for a while, and had the repair technician do an assessment on my old 24 inch iMac that was 1920x1200 with 3.06 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 2 gigs RAM, 500 Gig hd, and NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GS with 512 mb graphics memory, and he reported that it was worth a $500 refund, with tax! So, I jumped at that opportunity, and bought a new 27 inch iMac that is 2560x1440 with LED backlighting, 3.1 GHz quad core Intel I5 processor, 4 Gb RAM, 1 TB HD, and AMD Radeon HD 6970M with 1 Gb graphics memory. It also has a wireless keyboard and mouse, with the mouse having no scroll ball to get jammed with crud. Instead, it is sensitive to touch, and so can scroll just by brushing your finger over its smooth surface. I also bought a 1 Tb external drive for making backups so I won't lose anything again the next time the drive fails. I was told that Seagate hard drives are the most reliable, which the external backup drive likely is. So now, I have been working on getting thing set up and registered, and reinstalling all sorts of stuff. Before I got the new computer, I had to use an old Toshiba notebook computer with Windows 98 and a dialup modem. It is great to have access to high speed again.
But, I have fallen a bit behind in these forums, and have lots of stuff to catch up on (while I was on dialup, I did keep up with non-content related threads and some others with content that I don't usually download). It is so nice to have more room on the screen for things. My dad is slowly getting better each week, but the key word is slow, which isn't fast enough for him, who is chomping at the bit to get back to doing things. But, it likely won't be until late summer before he recovers enough, although he has done some mowing with the riding lawnmower before I finished the job, and he has done a few light things, with a lot of help.
But anyways, stay tuned for a new sinking video, and two new adventures.
It is so nice to scroll by just stroking the smooth surface of my magic mouse! 
