After some wrangling, several phone calls, and a weekend of frightening media darkness, we’re back online. A Verizon dude came to the house, looked at the outside boxes, mumbled something to Jen about “going back to look at the mainframe”, and left. Hours passed, and then another nice man came out to make sure service had been restored. His efforts to make sure the DSL was working were thwarted by the updates I’d made to our cable routing during the downtime; I set up a honest-to-god punchdown block in the basement and commenced to rerouting and sorting miles of data cable hanging from the rafters like so many burmese pythons. After I got home from work, I made a few quick changes to the patch cables and restored the internet to glorious cinemascope. I still have to tighten up the remainder of the wiring, reroute coax that’s mixed in with the data cabling, and finish cleaning up the punchdown block before I can call it done, but it’s better than before. Oh, yeah, adding a 24-port switch to add into the rack would be nice…but it’s not necessary.
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Over the weekend our neighbors invited us to a “green” meeting (local folks coming together to talk about environmentally friendly methods and practices at the Lutheran church), and while the speaker was relatively good (a semi-nervous woman who sells eco-friendly products), it just so happened there was a used tool sale going on in the back of the room. For $15, we walked away with a 22″ hedge clipper, a full-size shovel, edging tool, and gravel rake, a pipe cutter, two channel locks, several snap-on wrenches, two unused paint scrapers, a sharpening stone, and the big find: a shaft-driven Bolens edging trimmer in unknown condition for the princely sum of $3. If I can get it running and swap out the gas tank (there’s a hole in it), my days of hauling 150′ of electrical cord around the yard will be over for good.
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After some confusion and a misplaced paper were cleared up last week, I finally got a box this afternoon containing ten window balances from Pullman, which will go into use just as soon as I can block the time out to install them.
Well, it’s final: I powered up my MacBook Pro yesterday and was greeted with a dark screen where I could only see the faintest hint of items on the screen. It looks like the backlight on my LCD has finally crapped out, which means one of two things: either the cables to the display have frayed and worn to the point of breaking, or I’ll probably have to replace the LCD/backlight assembly. Only some hours spent cracking the case will tell for sure. Unfortunately, I don’t currently see any replacement cables for sale.
If it’s the cable, we’re talking $30. If it’s the display, then we’re talking $300. In the meantime, I’m using remote desktop to work on my laptop from my work machine, which is like looking through a slightly blurry windowpane at my monitor—but still usable.
Well, it’s official: Saturn is dead. I kind of knew it would happen, even when they claimed that Roger Penske was going to buy it (buy what, exactly? Build what? That whole story never made sense).
I’ve spent a good deal of quality time with OS X Server (Tiger) over the last couple of weeks, and my experience has been very good overall. I had a previous install to learn from, so doing things like setting up users, groups, share points and sharing were a lot easier to do than if I’d tried it out of the box. Opening up ports for HTTP, FTP and VNC went smoothly, and I followed some helpful directions to log into the server using SSH and then share via AFP over a secure connection. I’m curious to get a copy of Snow Leopard Server and look at the differences.
I also bartered some networking help for a used G5 tower, which means our setup here at the house will be current as of 2004. The big thing is to have a machine that will take a SATA drive, which are cheap and plentiful—I’ve been cobbling together servers with ancient hardware for years, so when I can put an enterprise-level terrabyte drive in a five-year-old machine for ~$100, it means I can finally collect all of our photos, music, video, and backups in one place. I started moving files last night, and with the help of a utility called SmartReporter, I’m hoping I can avoid the catastrophic failure of our last music server.
I did not know this before, but the 3rd generation iPod will not charge from a USB connection, which sucks, because Apple decided to drop FireWire 400 ports from the back of new Intel iMacs. Which means I can listen to what’s on my iPod from my work computer, but I can’t charge it unless it’s plugged into the wall.
We are inching closer to that new car, but it’s slow going.
I’m going to have to break down and dip into the home equity fund to buy three more windows for the front porch before the really cold weather hits. It’s chillier at night now, and I’m too used to being able to work out there quietly. Also, having two computers on the dining room table for a second year in a row is unacceptable—especially with all of the cords hanging at Finn-height. Meanwhile, I just ordered ten more Pullman window counterbalances for the rest of the upstairs windows. Ten is about all the budget for this month will allow, and it’ll take me a weekend or two to get them all installed. The next step is to figure out a good way to blow paper insulation into the empty window pocket cavities without getting it all over the house.
My trusty MacBook Pro, after several years of faithful service, has started exhibiting signs of flaky behavior over the last couple of months. If I put it to sleep for my ride home, there’s a 50% chance it will have woken up and be cooking itself inside my computer bag. This happened when I was running 10.4 and has only gotten worse when I upgraded to 10.5, so I know it’s not software-related. I’ve reset the power management unit several times, but that doesn’t seem to make a difference.
Running Photoshop, Windows XP under Parallels, Mail, FTP, and three or four other essential applications concurrently makes the processor get hot to the point where I have the cooling fans on maximum. I’d guess several years of this have begun to fry some of the innards, making things flakier over time. Plus, I’m continually bashing my head against the 2GB RAM ceiling in this model.
Now I’m getting a single horizontal line across the screen about 1/3 of the way from the top, which is small enough to almost be invisible but large enough to be really annoying. When this line appeared in the past (always after the sleep-waking incidents) it would go away on its own after several minutes, but I’ve had a permanent line for 24 hours, which has me worried.
This is actually the second display for this particular laptop; I had the first one replaced under warranty only months after I got the unit. It’s well outside the warranty and Applecare coverage at this point, so I’m on my own. Some initial research prices a replacement at around $800, which is about $200 less than a new MacBook. I’m not afraid of doing the surgery myself, but for that kind of cash, I’d rather just buy something new.
I get the feeling this is a symptom of greater problems down the line.
So, new MacBook Pros (I don’t think I could trade down to a consumer-level MacBook) start at $1700 for a 15″ and go all the way up to $2400 for a 17″, which is considerably less than what they were 3 years ago. Refurbs are $200-400 less than list, and I have no hesitation buying last years’ model to save some cash, but right now is not a good time, considering we’re saving up for a baby-hauling vehicle. I can make do with what I’ve got by running an external monitor and just living with the problem, but I’m depressed that I can’t stretch the lifespan of this machine out another year or two.
Update: It seems to come and go. I though it might be because I was jamming the laptop in a bag with a bunch of other items, but carrying it separately had no effect. After several hours of sleep, the line goes away sometimes, and sometimes not.
Currently, the weather in Baltimore is glorious. Sunny, breezy, 75° San-Francisco-like weather. It’s heaven. Last night I was home a little early from work, so we decided to put Finn in the backpack and take a walk down into town for some ice cream after dinner. There are many days I wish my neck was double-jointed so that I could see the expressions on Finn’s face as she reaches out to brush her hand against bushes and trees and flowers as they pass by. Right before bedtime, she wanted to do some standing, so I put her down on the floor between my knees so she had something to hang onto. She decided she wanted to play with the tube of butt paste on the bed behind her left shoulder, and turned herself completely around, unaided, to be able to reach it. Tonight I have to lower the bed in her crib so that when she pulls herself to a sitting position, she can’t pull herself to a standing position and attempt a jailbreak.
Last week, the hard drive we were storing our entire music collection on started having catastrophic problems, to the point where it wouldn’t boot anymore. I pulled it out, dropped a spare drive in, and resurrected the server, but DiskWarrior is unable to rebuild the directory on the music drive at all. I’ve got a backup that dates back to the middle of 2008, but everything I’ve collected since then (minus the new stuff stored on my iPod) may be kaput. Ouch!
After an inauspicious start, Jen’s garden is going strong. She’s got pumpkins, cantaloupe, plenty of beautiful tomatoes, eggplant, cucumbers, and basil all growing happily. The asparagus is out of control—our cup will runneth over with pee-stinkin’ vegetables next year. On the other hand, my container plants are just sort of moping along, probably pissed that I haven’t been watering them religiously. I lost one of my eggplants to critters, some of my Big Boy tomatoes got blight, and the first crop of beautiful peppers I had coming in got nibbled on by something (most likely squirrels). Of course, they had to nibble on all of them just to be sure they didn’t like the taste instead of only one.
There is dog in our future, and it will be a breed that likes to chase squirrels.
After about four months of suffering through a faulty email setup, I got tired of manually marking and deleting junk mail every half an hour. So today at lunch I finally nuked my main account and set it up from scratch. The way mail.app handles IMAP accounts is confusing, to say the least, and Apple’s explanation of how it interacts is pretty thin on details. (Most searches, predictably, focus on setting up Gmail for IMAP on mail.app). I’m still having some hiccups here and there but all seems to be better in my email world now.
Finding a decent video encoding scheme for Flickr has been a huge nightmare. I’ve found that the default encoding from our Canon SD900 (AVI format) works flawlessly, while almost every encoding schema for Flip video footage processed through Quicktime Pro looks like garbage. I’ve got a ton of footage that gets pixellated and blocky as soon as it hits Flickr (or, alternately, bonks out with a yellow “This video cannot be processed” message). I’m going to keep working on this and hopefully find a solution I like.
The heat has returned to Baltimore, and with it, our peculiar pattern of hot, muggy sunshine in the morning, cloudy afternoons, short, violent thunderstorms towards the evening commute, and unbearably humid evenings. I may have to put the full soft top back on the Scout in order to drive it to work once a week; nothing sucks more than driving home in the rain.
This next clip is sheer genius. I was confused, at first; I hadn’t realized Sarah Palin’s “Speech” was so disjointed and illogical until I read the actual transcript.
→ This is a syndicated post from my Scout weblog. More info here.
I had a scare last week where I thought I might have lost a whole mess of data from my production server, and realized I didn’t have a recent backup of either of my websites. Last night I set up the new server in the basement with a pair of Automator scripts based on the original one I’d written last year, utilizing built-in functionality in the superb Transmit and a little AppleScript-fu.
The first step is to have Automator open Transmit. Next we add a Transmit-specific Synchronize command to back up only the latest files from the remote server.
Once that’s all done, I had to do a little research to figure out how to close Transmit, because Automator 1.0.5 doesn’t come with a premade “close application” action (although the 2.0 version does). Drag the “Run AppleScript” action to the bottom, and in the supplied text area, replace
(* Your script goes here *)
with
Tell application “Transmit” to quit
Note: this screenshot is from Automator 2.0, but the basics are the same.
Save it out as an application, and then add it into a repeating iCal event to run weekly or monthly.
Next I’m going to tack on the email notification script I worked out before. One problem I had with that script was that even when the script did not run successfully—if the computer was asleep or shut off, for example—it still emailed me saying it had. I don’t know why this happened, but since this server is scheduled to run constantly, I shouldn’t have that problem.
Crap. now we have to wait until 20 fucking 10 for LOST to come back on. Last night was, as I kind of figured it would be, a lot of story arcs intertwining, a lot of exposition, precious few answers and the introduction of a whole new slew of questions, and some questionable character motivations designed to keep things moving along. Without publishing any spoilers here, I’ll just say this season was a pretty good ride, but the producers have a lot of work ahead to clean up the many loose ends they’ve tossed about.
A few months ago, I had the good luck to do some basic design work for an iPhone app (an icon, splashscreen, and some minor beta testing, but not the website) and it’s now available through the iTunes store: GoCraigsy is an app which will create and post new Craigslist listings. If you’ve got an account (and even if you don’t, I believe), you can create an ad, populate it with location and Google map data based on your phone’s location, take and add photos with the iPhone camera, and post the whole thing to the Craigslist city of your choosing.
It will also let you browse your current listings based on supplied account information, which makes it invaluable for people who have a ton of stuff to get rid of which doesn’t fit in one listing.
Overall, it’s clear there was a lot of thought put into how the overall user experience works; it’s designed to get the user to the places they need to be with a minimum of fuss and tapping around. Taking a picture is easy, and the ability to flip and delete photos is included; there’s a field for boilerplate text, which means tedious junk like contact and terms info can be entered once and forgotten. And, my suggestion to add horizontal text entry was included, so it’s that much easier to type longer entries.
My only beef with it is that it’s difficult to find through the iTunes store; you’ve got to know what to search for exactly in order to find it, but that’s an Apple issue.
If you have an iPhone and sell a lot of stuff on Craigslist, you can’t beat the price. Go try it out!
I’m using Adobe’s CS3 suite pretty regularly on my MacBook Pro now, and let me just say, it is a GOOD THING. Boot times measured in seconds, faster UI interaction, and, best of all, I don’t have to waste minutes of my day waiting for older, non-Intel applications to wake up and run through the emulator.
Other than that, it’s nose to the grindstone, baby.