Jon's Network

This afternoon on my MacBook Pro, Mail and Safari were acting screwy. Safari would give me a beach ball when I tried to fill out a form on Amazon and Mail would give me a beach ball when it did an address look up when I typed someone’s name in the To: field. I tried to open Address Book, but it wouldn’t open, instead giving me a “not responding” status immediately in the Force Quit Applications window.

Not having the skills or time to really find out what was going on, I popped open Cocktail and repaired the disk permissions and left to run some errands. I came back 3 hours later, glanced at the Cocktail log and opened a new email. When I typed a name into the address field, it did the look up (I could see the spinner working) and then stopped, not having found the name. This time I was able to open Address Book to see that everything was gone. All my contacts. Thousands of them. Gone. I visited the MobileMe page, naturally, the contacts were gone there too. I then opened my iPhone to turn off syncing before it got wiped – too late. Since I didn’t find the problem before SuperDuper made my daily backup, it looks I have lost my most recent changes, but luckily nearly everything is saved in my Daylite database so this isn’t critical – just a huge pain in the ass.

I had been reading headlines about the MobileMe problems, but never suffered any until this afternoon. I was a .Mac customer before solely for the convenience of the iDisk to backup a small amount of critical data so Apple won’t lose any of my money, but I have turned off over-the-air sync and don’t plan to turn it on until 2010 or so. If my contacts got wiped from my phone while I was on the road I would be crippled. Nope, can’t take that chance.