Chris Alexander

On Engineering

An Accidental Flame War

5th January, 2010

I’ve been having a few technical problems with my Macbook - when I try and boot it into OS X, it gets half way through loading, then turns itself off (fortunately Windows 7 was also installed to save the day).

Given my somewhat limited OS X knowledge, I thought it would be a great idea to “crowdsource” a solution, and asked my Twitter followers what I could do about fixing it. The results were… unhelpful (at least to start with).

It started off so simply, with this perfectly innocent tweet:

My macbook won’t boot into OS X any more. Recovery options?

… which was met by this torrent of flame:

@chris_alexander Rejoice and boot it in to Windows 7? - @nicktelford

@chris_alexander Bin it and buy that custom-colour Mac Book Air off @nicktelford he won earlier? - @domwrap referring to an earlier spam tweet

@chris_alexander Have to agree with @nicktelford there. - @joshmcgregor

@chris_alexander Install an operating system on it? :-) - @patparslow

@chris_alexander “Kill it with fire” an option? - @mangek009

@chris_alexander rejoice? - @emmaguy

… and just clinging on to his dignity:

I nearly replied…nearly… it was just unintended troll-bate really - @andrewharvey

Fortunately there were some useful comments in there, and hopefully with @PCurd, @cookiecut and @IanField90′s help I will soon have it back and running again.