I’m back home after 2 weeks on vacation. Yeah….I worked during the entire vacation at every moment of downtime but such is the COVID life. Work follows you everywhere you go whether it be to the garage or backyard or park or 2800 miles from home.
It’s Friday and I’ve been home for 7 days and every waking moment since I got home has been at a computer catching up. I have 2 very major projects due on Monday so I’ll be working all weekend but Heather has really missed me where I was gone for 2 weeks then I came back and spent a week staring at a computer screen so I am taking the night off to sit with her by the fire. She’s making tacos right now so I have that small break to write something down in the blog.
Oh, my Magic Keyboard stopped working during this trip…it works fine but it’s click as I closed it against my iPad Pro stopped working. It wouldn’t snap closed and the keyboard would hang open away from the screen so I called Apple….”we don’t do DIY repairs via telephone, can you take it to an Apple Store?” Well no, that’s 2 hours away so they said Best Buy could help. I went to Best Buy and they don’t do any accessories troubleshooting so I technically had Labor Day off (not really) so I drove down to Manchester NH to the Apple Store and on a whim, they fit me in (with a 2 hour wait) so they put my iPad Pro 11” 2018 on a few magic keyboards in the store (covering my iPad in COVID-19 of course) and determined my iPad Pro which falls out of AppleCare+ on the day it came out 2 years ago (October 30th 2018) so they offered to have me come back to the store in 2 days to pickup an iPad Pro that would be mailed there….I declined.
Turns out they updated the case notes verifying the issue and I called Apple (again) and they setup the @ home replacement and I let them authorize my card for $800 and they shipped me a new iPad Pro which works brilliantly and the magnetic issue is resolved. I had no idea that the iPad Pro’s insanely strong magnets could lose their magnetism so suddenly. I then returned my iPad Pro back to them and so my keyboard & and its iPad Pro work properly again. Hopefully that $800 auth falls off my AppleCard in a few days.
This would actually be the first time in 3 years I’ve used AppleCare+ to save my butt. If I had not purchased it, I’d have to purchase a new iPad if I cared so much about the magnets that I needed to spend $800 to upgrade a perfectly fine device…no thanks. I do love the Magic Keyboard but I’ll wait for the iPad Pro receive a real revision before purchasing a new one and hopefully Apple has the foresight to design its replacement with the Magic Keyboard in mind. It’s a brilliant accessory (I’m writing this post on it).
I returned from Colorado with 480 gigabytes of video and photos to process. Should make for a great YouTube series when done. total video is around 18 hours but I’ll shrink it down to 12, twenty minute episodes covering 12 of the 14 days we traveled to and from Colorado on motorcycles. That’s not my project due Monday but that project does remain ever-present in my mind.
Finally, my Synology NAS suffered a critical failure right before my trip. Sigh. So my response was purchasing six 16 terabyte hard drives to a tune of $1800 to get up and running again. All of my data was moved and we’ll be back up before you know it. More on that in another post.
Thanks for reading. Looks like chicken tacos are ready. Heather has been marinating the shredded chicken for 48 hours in her homemade salsa from the garden. What a great life this is.