Today doesn’t feel like it’s my birthday. Actually, as my friends would attest to, I never gave my birthday that much thought. Often I even forget all about it – even if it was just around the corner (like today). Regardless, today was especially irritating because, aside from the fact that I’m one year closer to the day I die, a bunch of… not-so-happy-events also occured.

The Church

First was being woken up at 6:00am for mass. Yes, as rarely as I attend mass, going to church is required when it’s an immediate family member’s birthday. Mine was no exception. But I’ve made my peace with that. What got on my nerves was the priest! oh the priest…

As Tim Henson of Distorted View Daily says: Sometimes, people just have to know when to throw in the towel. This is precisely what had happened in church a while ago: The priest kept on stalling because he couldn’t read the text properly. At one point he stopped for a good 3 mins flipping pages because he “got lost” in the order of the mass. You’d think that as a priest, you’re required to say at least one mass daily – that you’d remember enough to not rely on the text so much. But what if it was alzheimers… more reason to stop doing it!

The Laptop

Acutally, before the whole mass thingie, I pressed turned on my Powerbook to check mail. It wouldn’t boot! I could get to reset the NVRAM, the PMU, even go to open firmware mode, but cannot get past the Apple logo and spinner.

I ended up passing for Stevie and Juan‘s Tiger CD (cuz I lent mine to Happy) to boot from it (the CD). Thankfully, it did boot and allowed me to isolate the problem: the hard disk. I couldn’t repair it at all. The repair utility kept on failing. I’m not sure though if it’s because the hard drive is has been physically damaged¹ or that it’s simply being an HFS bitch – as you know the HFS filesystem, while people swear by it, is one of the suckiest filesystems to recover.² For one thing, you can only rely on limited software utilities – and most of them only are effective when you’re doing basic maintenance³ There’s no Mac counterpart for a SpinRite

And Juan told me about his adventure wherein his drive couldn’t be accessed, and therefore had to be reformatted, which magically fixed the problem. Now what does that tell us? Nothing was wrong with the drive physically because a reformat fixed it. But it also meant that despite not having physical defects, there was no other way to recover that data in the Mac front.⁴ It’s beyond me why there is no mac utility that is able to read data directly from a hard disk without having to mount them. We need some sort of brute force utility, because there are a lot of cases that you can’t access a perfectly healthy disk simply because the catalog tree or whatever the hell they call it got corrupt beyond restoration.

Anyways, I thank Stevie and Juan for making that CD available at the last minute as I couldn’t get my own copy back because of another mishap:

The Phone

I couldn’t call Happy because my outgoing calls/texts were deactivated! Without any warning. No notification to settle any balance, nada. Suddenly I couldn’t call or text. Couldn’t thank anyone (not that I thank everyone who texts me, but still) couldn’t confirm with Cris the plans later.

I always paid my bills promptly when reminded, it’s a simple matter of doing it online. So it really irks me when something that should’ve never been a problem suddenly come up and bites me in the ass. And of all days it had to happen, it just had to be today.

So I went online and tried to log-in my banking page… I got this message:

You have entered incorrect information, your account has been disabled. Please contact… blah blah fucking blah!

I was on a roll!

The Bank

So I called the bank, and sorted that out (someone must’ve been trying to get into my account and deactivated it by entering the wrong password. A tip to whoever tried this: Just don’t. You can’t possibly guess my password, trust me. My banking password literally looks like this:

CAZWBaaZ3SQC22mEsPzzmiIqi9qwBzpM20wJzlT6o2Zr3L64kh95RDmU2mO09RL Courtesy of https://www.grc.com/passwords.htm

So I guess you gathered that I myself have to cut and paste it – which means I didn’t make a mistake in inputting a password.⁵

Suffice to say, I sorted that out with the bank, and was able to pay my bill. I called Globe informing them of the payment and my outgoing messages/calls should be active again in a couple of hours. Still, it all had to happen today.

Honestly, I’d rather be living in any other day but today. Is there a skip button in life? Maybe tomorrow would be better.