Category: what i don’t like…today

Macbook Click of Death

My purse no longer contains a sleek black laptop. I write this as I grudgingly stare at my PowerBook. Earlier today, while chatting inside my Parallels instance, my Macbook stopped responding, save for the mouse, and I heard some scratching going on below my right hand. No, this wasn’t the normal geiger-counter sound of a healthy hard disk, this was the click of death. A long scratching sound followed by a clicking made my heart sink. Much like my backup drive failing before, I knew I was doomed… but this time… it was much worse.

I quickly left work and picked up a firewire drive. I was able to boot my Macbook and grab my entire home directory, approximatgely 22GB. Happily, that part of the drive was still accessible. With data safely stored, I ran a Disk Utility, and three hours of node errors and the dreaded scratch and click… it was high time that I headed on over to the Apple Store. The Apple concierge service, said that the Somerset store was experiencing high customer volumes, so I was unable to get an appointment to see a “Genius”. I took the chance and drove on over to see if I could just drop my Macbook off to be diagnosed in the morning. After waiting patiently for scores of minor iPod issues and a guy with a dirty keyboard, I was able to get get a hold of a “Genius” ten minutes before the store closed. The first lines of dialogue with the “Genius” keyed him in that I wasn’t just another vapid computer user, and we were able to quickly come to the conclusion that the drive needed to be replaced. The repair is quick (it’s just a few screws) but I was told three to five business days to get the part in. For now… I’m back to lugging around my PowerBook.

Another Window(TM) closes…

Readers that come to my site may already know the mess that is my office. Refresh this site enough and in the header image will give you a tiny peek of the chaos. The picture does not do the true mess justice, because two machines are not in the frame, an IPCop Firewall box on a Pentium II and an XP machine running a 1.8Ghz Pentium 4. The latter has been my Windows whipping boy, abused for its disk space and exploited for its TV tuner… until now. Over the years and three TV tuners, due to power spikes and lighting strikes this last TV tuner has degraded.

Weeks ago, I bought a usb stick TV tuner, I’m not going to mention the vendor or supplier… this isn’t a viral marketing post. It arrived the other day and I attached it to the gracefully aging iMac (17-inch USB 2.0, Horizon, Q26C). It’s turning out to be a good system. I haven’t used any of recording/transcoding EyeTV features that came with the hardware, but I’m excited that they are there.

So, what’s in store for my fading XP box? Hook up M.A.M.E. and my two-player X-arcade

confessions of a husky boy: office donuts

I awoke this morning, late. Knowing full well that the potential for well balanced meals lay dormant in the kitchen, I headed out the door. [ For some regular readers, please do not consider this as a leitmotif. ] Blearily made it to work thinking that I’d walk to the corporation’s commissary for a bite to eat, scratching cardio and daily allotment of nitrates off the to-do list.

Silently typing away at my computer without my first cup of coffee, the boss comes in, after two weeks of leave with boxes of breakfast pastry. Now, I’m going to chalk this up to weariness but when there was nobody I took a peek at the boxes. Not having taken a donut in many a week, I felt justified. None of my top favorites were there, no buttermilk or sour cream, cruller, nor fruit filled. I settled for a lovely glazed yeast-risen donut. As I took the first bite, I savored the lovely sweetness — soft chew and smooth crumb. Grabbing a coffee from the suite’s coffee station, I promptly finished the donut, but had a sinking feeling that I’d be asleep from the sugar shock by 0900.Feeling dirty, I decided to write about this. The more shameful side-note of this story, is that I’m already half-way through a chocolate chip muffin as I type this line.

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