Talk Macs

Out Team Lead boldly goes where no man has fit before.

1. Who are you?

Corey “Toque” Zaytsoff; Team-Lead.

2. How long have you worked for Macinhome?

One and a half of your human years.

3. What’s the most complicated Mac situation you’ve come across?

Once upon a time, in a dark part of my history, I was a member of the Langley Best Buy Geek Squad. During this time, I became known for my skills with Apple Computers and had formed my own client base. During this time, there was a gentleman (30 years old) and his father (around 70) that came in to buy a MacBook Pro. The whole buying process took about 2 weeks for them as they had a lot of questions, but I found them to be enjoyable individuals. Then, two months later, the son came back in with a heavy look in his eyes.

It turns out that while he was at a friends house, his friend accidentally spilt a keg of beer on his MacBook Pro and the machine now refused to boot. To add to the tragedy, he had pictures of him and his dad on the machine which he had not backed up – pictures that needed to be recovered because his dad had recently passed away.

Buying that MacBook Pro was the last thing they did together.

I spent over 13 hours on that machine, disassembling it and cleaning each part of all the residue and replacing cables in hopes of getting it to boot. Because this was physical damage, neither Best Buy nor Apple would help the guy. I finally got the machine to work with the hard drive intact, pictures saved.

When asked the above question, most technicians will tell you about a highly complicated job based on a technical scale. However, given the nature of what we do, I find the emotional aspect can make a job so much harder. I always remind myself that even though a client’s computer is just metal and electricity to me, it has a soul to them and has to be handled with the utmost care.

This is what makes any job difficult.

4. What’s the most frequent problem that you fix (at work)?

Inter-office romance. And wireless problems.

5. What do you love about your job?

I’ve always loved problem solving! To come to a solution when everything seems dire – there’s no feeling like it. The people I work with keep my sanity in check though, by being completely insane themselves. Even when everything seems madness inducing, we always find a way to poke fun at each other and laugh.

Isn’t that right Audrey and Blair?

6. What’s the next piece of software/design feature/device that you’d like to see Apple bring to market?

Two things:

1) MacBook Tablet – Come on Apple, we know you’ve been ordering touch screens big enough to be tablets. Just release the damn things already!
2) Apple Netbook – Apple said it couldn’t make a netbook that wasn’t “junk”, but I own an Acer netbook (relax folks, I’m running Linux on it) and it runs fantastically. I’ve hacked a Dell netbook (can Apple sue me for that? I bought the copy of Leopard…) and it was the greatest little portable machine ever! If Apple dropped prices down into that area and created that little a machine (MacBook Air is technically portable, but is a bit glitchy in my opinion), their market share would skyrocket.

7.  What’s one Mac-maintenance habit you wished your clients would undertake on an ongoing basis?

Laptop owners – Clean your screens and organize your “Download” folder.
Desktop owners – If the images in your iPhoto library are of a private nature, don’t ask me to organize it for you!

I blush easy.

I setup a client with Google Apps and a domain name about a week ago. The goal was to have their Powerbook G4 and iPhone 3G access the same Google IMAP account and stay in sync, and then set their Telus email account to forward all mail to the new Google address.

Once all the IMAP setup was done at the client’s home, and once all the email had been copied out of their Inbox and Sent folders into local folders “On My Mac”, I took a backup snapshot of their Mail folder prior to removing the account from the Apple Mail preferences to leave them with just the sleek new Google IMAP account (removing an account in Mail deletes all the stored email for that account – yikes).

All was well when I left; they had all their emails and life was good.

A few days later, I got an email from the client saying a bunch of their mail was missing. I thought “how could that be? I know I got it all, and spot checked to be sure.”

I went to the client’s office and started digging around in the old mbox files. They had all their mail from what I could see… It did not make any sense.

With some pointed questions about the specific way the client was storing their email, I found that they actually press “Delete” on the messages they don’t need in the Inbox anymore, but never empty their Trash folder, so  those messages always come up in Spotlight searches when they need something.

I looked in the Mail backup on my portable LaCie Rugged, and sure enough, there was a Deleted Items mbox sitting pretty at 5.28GB.

Eureka! Saved by the spidey sense backup.

A couple of clicks and an Import… later, and all the messages were back; in a new folder On My Mac called Archive, of course.