I thought only windows machines were this kind of flaky

So I get to the nice helpful apple store "genius bar". The nice tech uses another firewire drive to test my port. All fine. We plug in mine. All fine. I go off. I end up with a small amount of wait time at someone's house, I plug in everything. Ackk. Can see drive over USB but not firewire again. Just for shits and giggles, I unplugged the USB and put on the firewire - hey look, my disk is still there and working! So I start Time Machine. But then I ran out of time and had to shut everything off and go home. So now I'm home. Guess what - Usb works, firewire doesn't. Not with any configuration of boots, cables, cable changes, anything. What. The. Fuck.

One of the things the nice apple tech said about this machine - they won't service it, because it's older than 5 years. So if my hardware is bad, I'm out of luck, they don't stock parts. Still, all in all, short of learning unix, I still like the Mac better than any PC I've ever had, so it's replacement, when it breaks, will be another Mac.