There was no simple solution. There was a time-consuming, misery-inducing, costly solution. But I took what I could get.

Back home, I elected to let the MacBook Pro dry out, presuming that it was a small amount of water, and that allowing the machine's innards to dry out completely might cure what ailed it. How wrong I was.

When I finally turned the MacBook Pro on again, it exhibited the same problems: The startup screen would appear with a progress bar, one akin to the screen you might see when installing a firmware update. And long before the progress bar filled, the Mac would shut itself down. Not good.

Now, as I've written for , I take backups very seriously, and have a : I use a combination of , , , and to ensure that my data is backed up in case of an emergency. And boy, did this situation ever count for one.

But at the same time, I'd been in San Francisco all week, with my Time Machine and SuperDuper backups at home. That meant my main backups were a week out of date. CrashPlan, an online backup service, would be more current--but getting at those backups requires either lengthy downloads from the Web, or requesting (at additional expense) a drive with all your data from CrashPlan.