It's Sunday, and I go to check my email, only I can't. For some reason, the mouse isn't moving to the Linux screen [1]. Odd. Perhaps Synergy [2] crashed or something, so it's good thing I also have a KVM (Keyboard,Video, Mouse) switch installed as well. Only the keyboard isn't working [3].
Sigh.
Swapping the keyboard connections on the KVM didn't work. Plugging in the keyboard cable for the Mac into the Linux system didn't work.
Sigh.
Okay, let's try rebooting. Only the machine didn't come back up [4].
Sunday had been bad enough. I decided not to think about the computer at all.
Until today.
It was a rough few days and not without some panic. While I do have a backup of the files on the machine, it's a few months out of date, and the backup drive is a native Linux file system, so even if I had a current backup, I wouldn't be able to read it on the Mac (Important note: transfer some critical files to the Mac). And I run my own DNS (Domain Name Service) server on the Linux box, so I had to work around that for a few days.
It turns out the computer is mostly fine—it's just the video card got fried somehow. And now I'm having to: