My MasterCard is 100% paid off. (Breathes sigh of relief.) Now to pay off the San Francisco trip on Jen’s card…
I seem to have a burgeoning business doing some IT consulting—really, I’m just filling in for a friend—but it’s interesting to see how many people are in need of good Mac help. Last night I resurrected a dying drive from an iMac and got it ready to burn to DVD, which will make the clients very happy. They bought an Airport Express for use as a wireless base station—I wasn’t aware you could use it as a stand-alone base station; I thought it was just a remote extender for an existing wireless network. Stupid Bill!
I said before that I’d like a lampshade-style iMac, but Apple just announced the new iMac G5, which is not much bigger than a standard flat-panel monitor. I think Mrs. Lockard would find working on this machine a lot easier than her current laptop. And for $1,300, the baseline 17″ model is not a bad deal at all.
Also: Skype (VoIP software for computers) is now available, in beta, for OSX. I’ve used the alternative, a SIP-based phone made by Cisco, and while it was very cool (think of this idea: carry a phone with you wherever you go. Find an outlet and an RJ45 jack, plug it in, and call England for nothing more than the monthly fee—in my case, something like $10) it wasn’t as simple as being able to do it from my laptop, which would be sweet. If you can get past the cellphone-like lag time, it’s *almost* as good as the real deal.
Dumb House News. There is now a working light in our linen closet. I have still to do the finish sanding, but it should be ready for shelving in the next few weeks, after the bathtub access hatch is finished off. Rejoice!
Suddenly, one day a few months ago, about 10% of the tracks in my iTunes library suddenly went missing (The little “!” circle showed up in the left column.) I opened up one of the missing tracks, iTunes asked me if I wanted to find it, and I opened the folder to find the track right where it was supposed to be—iTunes had simply “forgotten” it. I searched for a month for a fix for this problem, until I found the solution on an iTunes scripting site: Run Applications -> Utilities -> Disk Repair and choose Repair Permissions. (Close iTunes first.) Problem solved. Not solved. I had to run a script called iTunes Track CPR to fix a lot of the busted track info. I’ll update you more as I clean up the directory.
I loaded iDVD last night and played around with it last night for a few hours—I’m going to burn a DVD and send it up to my folks. It takes some time to get used to the UI, but once I began to grasp the concept behind the layout, it made sense. One nifty feature is the drag-and-drop flexibility between iTunes, iPhoto and iDVD. I created an iPhoto album of all the honeymoon shots, a song playlist in iTunes, and dragged them both into iDVD: Bam. Instant slideshow on DVD, with all the image source files included so that my parents can pull them off the disc and print them if they like. I also re-encoded a Quicktime movie and included that on the disc, but I haven’t tried re-encoding the video clips from my camera yet. Another good resource to look at (if you have four zillion photos, like me) is this article on O’Reilly, which covers backing up your iPhoto library with optical media.
(Some tracks not so much, but some are very well made.)
We Now Return You To Your Regularly Scheduled Bill Dept.: Go check out the Freakwater site for some good kickin’ alt-kuntry music. I’d heard of this band for years but never got around to checking out their music. I particularly like the Waitress Song.
I have yet to check out the newly introduced Apple Lossless Format for encoding music, but you can be damn well sure I’m going to try it out. I also could have used the WMA->MP3 converter about two months ago. Now that I’ve spent countless hours ripping and updating MP3 files from the personal collection, I’m not happy about having to go back and re-rip stuff for better quality so soon, but that’s a gripe for another day. I’ll report back here tomorrow.
While packing up to leave work yesterday, I got a call from Jen, who asked for an ETA. It turned out that Penn decided to jump on Geneva for no good reason, chomping her on the leg, drawing a frightening amount of blood and scaring the shit out of Jen. She quickly got Geneva bundled up and off to the vet while I returned home to clean up after Penn’s mess.
I should stop here and describe all the occupants in the House Of Cats for everyone to understand (and I’m sure Jen will have things to add here.) We have five:
Sage, A.K.A. Chocolate Love, Chubbo, The Big Man, Barry White. Big, black, and on your lap. Sage is the most mellow of the five, has the best personality, and keeps the others in line (mostly.) Saved from a dumpster in Texas many moons ago, he is the first of Jen’s family.
Geneva, A.K.A. Miss Thing, Pretty Girl. A teeny little barn tabby Jen rescued years ago; a fearless mouser in her prime, she doesn’t see so good any more. She has also become the target of my two teenaged hellions on account of her X chromosome.
Pique, A.K.A. Get Off, Peekaboo, Coaldust, Dr. Zaius. Possibly the dumbest of the five, he avoids all conflict by the sheer force of stupidity. His superhero power is the ability to seek out painful pressure points and full bladders by standing on them for long periods of time. He would probably stare at the sun and blind himself if he was smart enough to look up.
Penn, A.K.A. Mr. Ben, Shitbrain, Shut Up, Penndandy. I picked him up at the ASPCA when he sat in his cage staring at me and meowing repeatedly; I mistook stupidity for intelligence (a fault of mine.) Easily the most aggressive and self-centered of the five, he can be both a well-behaved fop and an insufferable prick at the drop of a hat. Alive only because of his good looks. (ASPCA name: Dandy)
Teller, A.K.A. Get Down, Telleropolis, Stony Ray. Adopted the same day as Penn, he has a quiet personality and big green eyes; he can be sweet and loving but sometimes belligerent as well. (ASPCA name: Raymond)
So, after cleaning up the pool of blood near the radiator, I put food, water, a litter box, and a towel in the front basement room and threw Penn in there for a night of solitary confinement. Because this is an ongoing problem, we are bringing him to the vet for a psych test and a prescription of Little Blue Pills; hopefully his attitude will mellow and peace will reign over our little kingdom for the first time.
Geneva is fine. The vet said that cats generally close right up after being bitten, and that it was a good thing she bled out (cleaning the wound.) We have two weeks of antibiotics and a painkiller to administer, which involves a towel, two people, a bottle of Bactine, and some kitty wrasslin’. She doesn’t understand why life suddenly got worse, but she’s taking it pretty well.
The Internet is slow today, or at least HaloScan is slow, which is bogging my pageloads down. So if’n you tried to leave a comment here and couldn’t, try again later. My peeps with iPods and iTunes should boogie over to Apple.com and download the iTunes 4.5 and the iPod 2.2 updater—it’s not offered in Software Update, so it won’t automatically load for you.
Update 5 pm. This tower is running smoothly, and the Powerbook has a new lease on life. To my peeps who have Pismos (*cough* Rob and Dave *cough*), you gotta upgrade. It’s like having a whole new Powerbook.
Update 3:34 pm. Looks like (knock, knock) everything went smoothly and well. All my stuff is where it should be; I enabled journaling on my existing partition seamlessly, chose the “Archive and Install” option, and crossed my fingers as it started. 30 minutes later, I’m checking email, loading the updates, and it looks almost exactly the same.
One drawback about Panther is that it looks like ATM under Classic, the benchmark font utility, does not pass open font info along to Panther, so I have to use the OSX version of Suitcase. Sigh.
I’m offline for a few hours while I upgrade the Pismo to OSX 10.3. Wish me luck.
Great News. Looks like Hellboy is getting good reviews around the net this morning, which makes me very happy. I think the books are some of the most expressive, beautiful comics I’ve ever seen, and the stories only make them better. I think Jen and I may go see it this weekend (she doesn’t know that yet.)
Not So Great News. Unfortunately, we may have to walk: the transmission in the Taurus was giving me fits this morning. I merged on to the Beltway, and while I couldn’t hear anything over the sound of the rain, traffic, and radio, my Spidey-sense noticed that the engine was rumbling in a different way—I was still in first gear doing 55mph. I pulled over, shut it down, and re-started the engine, and that seemed to help, but the wonderful clunk of shifting into gear is getting more and more noticable each day.
There’s a great quote on the second track of Psyence Fiction by UNKLE: the beat slows, and you hear someone say “There were too many of us, we had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little, we went insane.” I found out last night reading an article on Lawrence Fishburne in last week’s New Yorker that the speaker was Francis Ford Coppola, describing US involvement in Vietnam. Pardon me for stating the obvious, but….
So, in case the wedding invitations were still a little oblique for some of you, here’s some more information about the bug on the cover.
Last night I met up with Jason for some drinks in the city. We’ve been following a sort of haphazard schedule with each other for the past six months or so—between work, play, and life, we don’t see each other as much as we used to. I’ve known him for about five years, and he’s grown to be a good friend of mine. When my previous relationship ended, he listened to my boring tales of woe. He’s been my answer guy for software questions (any meeting we have involves at least a half hour of Mac geekery), house tools that I might not have (thanks for the drain snake, my brother), and he posesses a wicked sense of humor that I can’t keep up with. The guy kind of pisses me off, because he’s good at everything he tries.
He’s also in the middle of shedding his worldly posessions, packing what’s left, and leaving Baltimore for the left coast. I’m happy for him, and I only want the best for him and his future, but his leaving fills me with a sense of emptiness.
Now I’m going to go sit in the corner with my woobie.
High Technology, Part 2 or, Stuff You Really Can’t Afford. One of the things Jason is getting rid of is a G4 tower, which is now sitting next to my desk here at work. I think you’ve probably gotten a good deal on a used computer when it comes to you with all of the original packaging—the twist-ties are still in the box with the manuals. It’s older technology at this point (a 400mhz G4 machine in the age of 2Ghz G5 towers) but it’s so much faster than this laptop, I can’t even describe the difference to you. Seeing the OSX screen at a resolution above 1024×768 is a novelty I won’t tire of for a while.
My to-do list is as follows: Back up HD from the iMac to the G4 -> swap HD to G4 -> reformat 160GB drive and partition -> load 10.3 -> load applicatons and data files -> move stuff back from iMac -> wipe iMac drive and load 10.3 -> load applications and music back on iMac. Got all that?
Today I took advantage of my day off not by lounging around the house in my PJ’s, but by continuing the incremental gains made on both the Pink and Blue rooms. All the relevant kickplates are in, and aside from one patch of drywall in a closet, all problem areas have been mudded and sanded at least once. My good friend Robby stopped by to pick my brain about Apple laptops, and I convinced him that a refurbished Powerbook was better for his needs than a new iBook. Which he ordered today, making me extremely jealous. Another Rob stopped by to drop off our DVD-ROM drive and offer his PDF services with the invitation, which we may need to take him up on. Jen worked a full day and made it home late after hitting the gym, where she has an appointment with her training advisor this Friday. We sat on the couch and enjoyed the improved feng shui of the living room—yesterday I moved the couch and recentered the ‘sitting’ side, which makes the whole thing work much better.
Among other things we’re trying to get rid of, there are thirty bags of leaves out at the curb this morning that to be taken by the County before the snow hits us this evening. Also, our good buddy Dave is bringing Clifford the Big Red Truck by this saturday to haul the carpeting, plaster, wood and other debris from the garage so that i can pull the wall/door off the front and back the Scout inside. That’ll be a large weight off my shoulders, because she’s doing nothing but rusting in the driveway right now.
Hello Again. This spring I was lucky enough to travel to Bimini and dive on the reefs for seven days, courtesy of my employer. One of the guys that accompanied us on the trip was Craig, who is an outside consultant to the company and an experienced diver. I spent a lot of time underwater attempting to adjust my buoyancy, regulate my breathing, maintain a constant depth, and work the camera, under his watchful eye. (while I was floundering around with all of that crap, he was quietly hovering off to the side, effortlessly keeping his depth with controlled breathing, making sure we were all OK.) At dinner he quietly taught us diving skills we hadn’t learned in our classes, and helped to keep us focused on what we were doing.
One day we were returning from our mooring point and heading back into the wind on the dive boat, which was an open-deck cruiser. I had turned my hat around to keep it on my head, but a stray gust of wind blew it off my hat and into the water. (Now, anybody that knows me has seen my battered Syracuse Orangemen hat at one point or another; it’s been with me since my early college years and remains the only hat that correctly fits my big melon. I’m kind of attached to it.) Craig, without thinking, had our divemaster turn the boat back around, and before I could do it myself, dove in after it, yelling “WILSON!”
He stopped in the office this morning, and I only had a chance to say hello, but it was great to see him.
Technology, Part 2. The original 10GB drive in the red iMac is bollixed up pretty good; it’s making a horrendous ratcheting noise upon reboot and then dropping off the IDE chain altogether. I switched the drive with a pull from the first iMac and it booted fine, so that’ll stay in there. I’ll say this much: the original Rev A-B iMac’s case was a lot easier to crack than the Rev C’s.