Okay, so my computer (in this case a MacBook Pro, Core 2 Duo) didn’t actually “attack”, but rather simply died… repeatedly. In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve been “offline” for about three weeks now. That’s not because I “wanted” to, but rather because upon arriving in Kuala Lumpur, my MBP decided not to boot. After highjacking my fellow evangelists to the hotel lounge, and working for over four hours on the machine – during which we tried booting while holding verious key combinations, using an external disk as a boot drive, booting from the Leopard CD and hooking the computer up as a Firewire disk – we were left with decidedly mixed results. Several times we were able to reach the desktop, but upon attempting to actually open files or applications we hit the beachball of death. Other times we never even made it that far, being forced to reboot due to a gray screen. There is/was no logic in any of the scenarios… it was more a question of “flip a coin”. But the strange thing was, the external drive never gave us a problem, booting repeatedly and without incident. Hmmm…

I subsequently limped through the rest of our tour, booting off of an external drive and having to shutdown completely after every session. Additionally, due to the external USB drive, battery life died to only a maximum of ~90 minutes. This made all work (and yes, that’s blogging too) incredibly painful… So I went ahead and ordered a replacement drive (the exact same model as before), which was waiting for me upon my return home. I spent the better part of that Monday (now 8 days ago) removing/replacing/reformatting/restoring the new HD into the old MBP. And, here’s the part I love, Time Machine restored literally EVERYTHING! Even my browsing history to the point that FF3 asked me if I wanted to restore my previous (albeit from 3 weeks prior) session. Too cool!

And with that, I truly thought that life (in the digital sense) was back to normal. But, low and behold, over the weekend I began to notice the same “beachballs” as before. This time though, the MBP would only spin a bit and then respond normally. That is until today. Last night, as I was about to finish my expense reports for my Asia trips, I hit the beachball again. And only after some 20 reboot attempts did it come up normally. Thinking that the system might somehow be corrupt, I even downloaded the lastest Apple update manually, and installed it. Then came the “morning of truth” – I put the laptop to sleep and placed it in my bag. But when I pulled it out on the plane, everything was gone… done… only a gray screen, regardless of how long you waited. Shite!!!

I immediately headed for the Seattle Apple Store (thanks, guys!), where we were able to diagnose the problem to either a logic board or the harddrive ribbon (the real culprit). But guess which part they didn’t have in stock… So, with no other option, and hundreds of registered attendees awaiting my sessions (all 7 hours) tomorrow, I had to purchase a completely new MBP. While at dinner, I let it restore my MBP backup (via TimeMachine), and once again TimeMachine impressed me. Literally everything (including the contents of my trash) was restored.

So, here we are again… Finally and reliably back online. For those readers waiting on the posts from the Masters Tour, I’ll be getting those up this week – thanks for your patience.

Cheers,

Greg

Yes, you read that correctly. In the words of an old John Denver song, “all my bags are packed and I’m ready to go”. It’s really hard to believe that I’m about to embark on this marathon trip. Even for a hardened road warrior like myself (I did 257 days on the road last year), this seems to be an incredible undertaking. I’ve been chuckling at recent questions from friends and associates as they hear about it and ask “so, where are you going?” I simply respond, the easier question is where am I NOT going…?!

For those who care, this trip will begin with a gawd-awful 5am wake-up and 6:30am pickup to head for the always lovely [sic] Sky Harbor airport here in Phoenix. Should all go as planned, the first stop on the mega-tour will be in the Netherlands, where Jason Levine and I will be holding court at the annual AVManifestation in Hilversheim. We’ll be demoing Adobe’s web/video solutions to this year’s visitors. From there, it’s a mad dash (I’ll be driving, so fasten your seatbelts) with Jason and Stephanie Sullivan down to Kortrijk, Belgium for another year’s appearance at MultiMania ’08. (The site for 2M08 is definitely worth a look – nice, all flash site.) Sadly, we won’t be hanging around for long, as it’s immediately off to Paris for the Flash Festival where I’ll be bringing folks up to speed on what’s happening in the world of Flash. Thankfully, Stephanie and I will get to spend a day enjoying Paris (sunshine, please).

Germany is next on the list with an initial stop in Karlsruhe for Webinale ’08, and then onwards to Zurich, Stuttgart, Berlin and Graz, Austria for the encore of our Adobe Masters’ Tour, featuring Jason, Rufus Deuchler and myself.

A brief stop in the US is next up – Orlando and ToDCon. I’ll be giving the keynote along with a session on Progressive Enhancement with the Spry Framework for AJAX. ToDCon is one of those really fun, small conferences where you really get to hang out and visit with both fellow speakers and attendees. I love doing this conference.

But my time on terra firma will be short-lived, as Stephanie and I will then embark on a 22 hour journey down-under, arriving just in time for WebDU. This is my other “favorite” conference – not the least of which is due to the fact that it’s held in beautiful Sydney. If the weather gods allow, we’ll be doing the Sydney Harbor Bridge climb on Sunday. I’ve already done it once, and it is truly spectacular. I just wish they allowed you to take your own camera up with you.

After a bit of a rest (it was supposed to be a 14 day vacation on the Great Barrier Reef, but alas, work calls…), I’ll be putting Stephanie back on the plane, and for me, it’s off to Seoul, Beijing, Taipei, Hong Kong, Singapore and Kuala Lumpur for the Asian leg of the Adobe Masters’ Tour.

I can assure you that when I finally see my house again on July 12th, it will be a sight for some very weary and tired eyes! But, if you’re in any of the areas I’ll be visiting along the way, please feel free to drop a comment here – especially if you know where the good beer is! And, of course, I’ll see you back right here for reports, pics and stories from the road. Cheers!

It’s quite simple really – I don’t want a smaller MacBook Pro. I like my 17″ screen. Now, slimmer… well, who doesn’t want that? Although the current “obese” MBP  is fine. My wish would be longer battery life and, more importantly, more RAM and a larger hard drive. I just bought a 200 GB / 7200 rpm drive that I’m looking forward to installing – just after Steve announces an 8GB/400GB configuration… Sigh.

On the iPhone front, I’m holding out for a 3G version. I travel sooo much to Europe and Asia that having to suffer through a “20th century” network like Edge is just… well… painful. Of course if it supported Flash (being an Adobe evangelist, of course) would be enough justification. However, on that note, I watched Mike Downey misspell an email three/four times tonight – and that was just the flippin’ email address!! My Nokia e61i has been a solid and reliable phone/pda. And the fact that I KNOW what key I’m pressing makes it easy to (don’t tell the cops) sms while I’m driving. And for those that think that you shouldn’t be interacting with your phone while driving – well, I have a GPS unit that works with my phone. Hmmm… you HAVE TO interact with a GPS unit while driving… unless you’re in the 1% that actually pulls over and types in your destination.

iPod… well, mine works fine for what I use it for – listening to music. I have been known to watch the occasional video on it, but that is truly the exception. And doing that on my phone…?! Give me 96 hour battery life and I might be tempted – but those of us who live on the road live by the mantra of conserving your phone battery ’cause you never know when you’re gonna be stuck for hours on end with no way to charge.

For Apple’s third party developers (of which, we at Adobe are one), I want apps that make me more productive. Microsoft, I want… no I NEED a new version of Office – NOW!!! But I want it to have feature parity with its Windows counterpart. Entourage sucked. Outlook 2007 rocks on the PC, but it bums me out to have to continually launch VMWare Fusion just to check my email. I want a REAL email client on the Mac. I’ve tried Apple Mail, and it’s very “decent”. But the fact is, at Adobe, we are an Exchange client and without full, no holds barred, and no workaround access to my calendar, Mail just doesn’t cut the butter.

For the rest of the software community – amaze me! Give me apps that make me think “how could I have existed without this”.

Here’s looking for an exciting Macworld Expo 2008! Prost!!