Amuyu

I’m 30K feet plus up in the air right now. Doing some work with my MBA. Can’t tell you again how cool it is to be able to work while I’m sitting on a plane. With a real computer.

So – I’m typing away at a blog post for work. As usual, I have my retinue of open apps doing their thing: chrome (I’ll talk about this vs safari some other time), iterm2 (you know about that right?), mail, and preview. I’m switching between preview and marsedit to write the blog post and all of a sudden my keyboard doesn’t respond. Even worse, I can’t command-tab to switch to another app to see if I can fix it. Switching over to iterm2 doesn’t let me type on the command line (which has always been my failsafe way of fixing things). I even try the shut the lid, go to sleep, and wake trick. That usually fixes keyboardy things. Nothing. I start panicking a little. I’ve been working on the work blog for a while and have much mental sausage already spent on it. In desperation, I close the lid, open and try to switch to another user (you do have another user just in case right?). That doesn’t work either. Can’t type in the login window!

The only thing that works is the shutdown button in the wake from sleep screen. I hit it and I’m asked for a login again. OH NO! But luckily, I can type in my admin user and password, at which point my MBA reboots. Because of the cool SSD thing, the reboot is very quick. With trepidation I login to my regular user and …

and …

It’s all back! All of it. My apps are where they are normally hidden (spaces), and Marsedit has my blog post open and current to the very last character I typed. Chrome recognized that I killed it and all my open tabs are brought back. Mail is happily doing it’s thing. iTerm2 is there waiting, flashing the cursor, beginning me to vi or something.

I’ve never had a full panic shutdown restart experience not cost me any work. Never. Lion fixed that. Somehow. Magic.

Now the question -what happened? Why did I lock up? I have a suspect. The only thing that didn’t come back is preview. It complained that the file I was looking at was not available because I didn’t have permissions to it. Hmmm… That file was in my dropbox and was just recently upgraded to one of the beta releases. I’m pointing the finger at that.