For the first time ever, I'm going to have to send my computer to be fixed. This is the fifth Mac I've ever had, and apart from the one that arrived broken, I've never had to take any of them in anywhere to have their bits prodded and poked.
However, a few days ago I connected my iPod to my desktop to sync it and recharge the battery, resulting in what appears to be the destruction of my iPod's hard disc, and the crippling of my PowerMac to the extent where I can barely turn it on without a kernel panic, even when booting from the Install CD.
A nice man at the AppleCentre in New Oxford Street told me it might be a problem with the extra RAM I added a while ago, but I swapped it all in and out and it doesn't seem to make any difference - if anything it's just got worse, which leads me to believe it's probably the logic board.
So now I have two useless pieces of plastic and circuitry lying around my flat, one (the iPod) that would have to be sent away to Apple and costs as much to repair as it would to replace with a brand new one, and the other (the PowerMac) that I've got to take in to an Apple dealer to get fixed up, or at the very least to rescue all the writing, design and website work that's on my hard drive. (Luckily all my music, bought and composed, is on a separate FireWire disc.)
At least I have an old iBook to work on and collect my emails, and I can always pop upstairs and use my sister's iMac (we're a Mac household, isn't that nice?), but not having a computer connected to the two LCD screens that sit on my desk, not having anything to output sound to the mixing desk that sits next to it, not having any reason to sit at my desk at all, it seems like I'm missing a limb or something. And I miss having an iPod terribly. It's amazing how reliant I've become on all this technology.
And now, because everything's conveniently out of warranty, I need to find about a thousand pounds to replace and fix it all. Jesus.