The iBook failed again today, and is as dead as it was on arrival three weeks ago. This happened without cause, right in the middle of an extremely crucial DC photo shoot for a multimedia piece which is due Wednesday. Panic.

Okay, I’m posting from the Apple Store, and everything’s hunky-dory again. Apparently my hardcore outdoor photo spree (an activity which involved taking sequential kinetic photographs of DC memorials and museums, then transferring those photos at frequent intervals to my hard disk from my pencam) drove the battery to a critical low-power mode, out of which it could only be restored by pressing the Ctrl-Option-Apple-Power button combination.

The guy at the genius bar just told me how to use fsck from the command prompt in single-user mode to run a file system check, and I’ve backed up the important data to V’Ger, so things are running smoothly again.

See, I’m being tested. I had thought at first that I was being subjected to the Job treatment — sunud-sunod na kamalasan — but now I think I’m getting the Abraham test: where I’m Abraham and the iBook is Isaac. If I’m right, then the iBook has been graciously returned to me as the son whom I love, and I should expect to find a big ram caught by its horns outside the Apple Store, to sacrifice to God Almighty.

Except that I’ve already installed some RAM. Hyuk hyuk!

I’m kidding, of course. I do see this incident as a sign from the Father, a gentle tug from him, reminding me that He is the One I should be loving with all my heart and mind and body and soul. It’s so easy to forget that while surrounded by gizmos, gadgets, and a secular culture which prizes them so highly. In other words, Jesus > iBook.