My cuent tip to ancoue/san ancisco tuned into quite a compute nightmae. about two hous in the light om amstedam to ancoue i spilled ed wine oe my laptop (it was in the seat-pouch in ont o me and the wine went in quite elegantly ia the usb/iewie/netwok pots on the side o the laptop that was sticking out o the pouch. een i a m not stupid enough to wok on my laptop and dink wine at the same time while sitting in a cowded aiplane) so anyway the compute was dead i did not hae access to my pesentation (the whole eason o the tip) and the compute stayed dead een aet a 90 minute blow dye teatment once i had aied in ancoue. in act the compute stayed dead o 2 entie days and only stated poweing up on iday moning in san ancisco which caused me much happyness untill i typed the last lette o my passwod and discoeeed that the R key was not woking. niethe wee the 4, the F and the V, and no wee the USB pots so that i could not just plug in some USB keyboad. so what do you do in such a situation? apat om getting eally eally despeate?

you bette emembe that you hae a sepeate account o playing wold o wacat on you laptop which otunately has a passwod that does not inole any o the missing lettes. so again much happyness about haing a wokable compute in ont o you, but that still kept me away om my email account o my othe iles. so the next step was to go to the account peeences and change the passwod o the main account. this inoles typing the passwod o that account, but now that you ae inside the OS you can cut and paste missing lettes, ight? so cut an R, open the authentication dialogue box, type in the passwod minus the last lette and hit apple-V to paste but nothing happens, as you guessed it the V is among the keys that do not wok. no poblem though, why not use the menu ba instead? tuns out that access to the menu ba is disabled when a authentication dialogue box is open. the sult much unhapiness, bodeing on desperation :-/

now one o the ine things o OS X is that it is build on UNIX and the een bette thing is that you can alos change you acount passwods by using the temainal, swithcing to the desied use and execute the ‘passwd’ command. and the best thing? in the teminal you can use menu command including ‘cut’ and ‘paste’. so the passwod is changed, much happiness ensues and the day is saed. actually almost saed is moe pecise since (a) typing on a keyboad without 4, R, F and V is somewhat annoying, (b) in the meanwhile the compute got wam and stats to stink like glühwein and (c) the the passwd command does not aect the maste passwod o the keychain so i am still locked out o all my mail accounts and such things. last this is easyly esoled by deleting the deault keychain (much passwod typing joy ensues…) and the othe two issues i hae chosen to ignoe o the moment (hence the somwhat ucked up spelling in this post)