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Here is my reason for having missed the deadline for Saturday’s Photo Hunt.

Thursday the 12th of July was a very unlucky day for me.

For my trusty iBook, rather.

At around 9 AM, I was sitting at the dining table with my laptop open and a mug of steaming hot coffee near it.

I can see at least one wise head nodding.

The only thing that I can say in self defense is: I didn’t do it. My loving wife knocked the coffee mug right on to the keyboard.

I wouldn’t have thought I had such fast reflexes. In a matter of milliseconds I upended the laptop to drain the spilt coffee, switched off the machine and got the battery out.

Fast reflexes and action notwithstanding, I was horrified to see a few drops of coffee in the battery compartment. I could only shudder at the kind of havoc the hot coffee would have played on the other unseen innards.

I called my good fried Abel in a panic. He runs a computer hardware business in Coimbatore and is the only Apple products distributor in the region.

He asked me to send the laptop to him for a thorough cleaning. So it was sent on the 160 km (100 miles) journey from Salem to Coimbatore through a courier.

I spent the whole of Friday the 13th worrying as I did not get a call from Abel. I feared the worst. I thought I had to fast track my plans for acquiring a MacBook Pro.

I had planned on waiting for the Mac OS X Leopard release (expected in October 2007), and my 3-year extended warranty on the iBook to end (in December 2007) before splurging on the next laptop.

Thankfully, Abel called on Saturday morning and said he was done and the iBook was in working order. The only damage that he could identify was that the ‘F1′ key wasn’t working. That was about the place where the hot coffee landed initially.

I got the laptop back by Saturday evening and discovered something else that wasn’t working. Mac users will know that they can close their laptops in the middle of working on something and open it up a while later (or even a few days later) and have it open instantly at the same place where they left. No waiting to reboot or waking up from hibernation as in Windows.

That isn’t working on my laptop. I have to manually put it to sleep before shutting the lid and hit any key to wake it when I open it later. It is still a far faster process than on Windows. The ‘going to sleep’ and ‘waking up’ are almost instantaneous. But I guess I’ve grown used to the easy one step way of just shutting the lid over the past two and a half years that I’ve had the iBook. Mac users are a spoilt lot.

A phone call to Abel got me the answer. He said he found a small magnet rolling around inside the casing when he initially opened up the laptop. When he had finished cleaning all the bits and pieces and was reassembling the machine, he couldn’t figure out where the little magnet went. He had kept it aside for safe-keeping.

Our guess is that the magnet is part of a switch located near the magnetic lock for the lid and it controls the auto-sleep feature.

Abel will be visiting Salem next week, so hopefully he can open up the casing and figure out where exactly the little magnet goes.

I guess Friday the 13th was in fact a very lucky day for me and my hapless iBook.

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