Beautiful Patterns, Common Threads

April 3, 1999 Urgent E-mail from Avi in Laos

Hey you two, as the major Mac Meisters on my list, any ideas what I can do if the floppy disc drive on my PowerBook is jammed and won't accept a diskette? It was having a hard time ejecting the adapter disk for my digital camera card, and when it finally did I had to pull it out with a SLIGHT bit of force (meaning, kind of to get it past something that was "clicking" it into place). Now, it won't accept anything at all. Is there a delicate way to get it back in operation? I'm in Vientiane, Laos, on my way to Cambodia, so the likelihood of finding someone who services Macs is NIL, I think. (You may know otherwise.) Whatever you guys can think of, LET ME KNOW!!

April 9, 1999 Much Less Urgent E-mail from Avi in Bangkok

Just had an amazing act of kindness foisted upon me; turns out the disk drive was destroyed at some point when a spring got weak enough it couldn't work to eject the disk I use to load digital images, and I pulled on it too hard and broke the read device. This guy at a computer store here in Bangkok worked on it for over an hour and got the spring device to work OK, then later we discovered the whole thing was shot (when we could finally get a disk in to check out); I was distraught, and went around trying to find a replacement, only to figure out nobody would have a disk drive for a five year old Powerbook in Bangkok. I was thinking I'd have to buy a whole new laptop or something, but I went back into the guy's store and it turned out he had one of the old disk drives, only missing a coupla parts mine had; so we jerry-rigged it together, it works fine, and he just GAVE the thing to me. I couldn't convince him to take any money, so I ended up just buying a mouse from him for SOME compensation, anyway. Quite a nice and GREAT thing to have happen, gotta tell you!