The MacWhisperer’s tips to work like a pro: Tip #1
Tip #1: When in Doubt… Restart.
People always ask me why things crash, why they don’t work, and why issues always crop up. My answer? I don’t have one. I don’t want one. I don’t need one. Why doesn’t matter to me… How to fix it? That’s the key! That’s all I care about.
I think about the Mars Rover. This piece of sic-fi equipment cost America BILLIONS of dollars. We pop that little rover robot into a spacecraft, and shoot it out of our atmosphere, and the spacecraft flies all the way to another planet, and launches out the rover. It lands on the red planet exactly as intended, pops out of it’s cocoon, and the on-board computer promptly crashed. Wow! Here’s this extremely expensive piece of technology, millions of miles away on the surface of another planet, and it crashed? WHAT???!!!!
I imagine the control center at NASA in this moment. The generals, the bigwigs, the politicians were losing it. HOW could this happen? And I imagine the technicians shrugging and laughing at all the chaos…. Why? Because they were totally prepared for this eventuality. They knew it was a distinct possibility. And they had a solution… A million dollar solution. Just restart it. They reached over onto their console, clicked a button, and the rover jumped back to life. And all was good. It continued to operate perfectly for several years after that, gathering rock and soil samples, and sending the info back to Earth.
The lesson I take from that example is this: ALL machines crash… And when in doubt… Try a restart. It’s THAT simple! Just restart it. It won’t solve everything, but it solves enough things to make it a valuable, don’t underestimate it, first troubleshooting step.
Category: The Mac Whisperer
