November 15, 2007 at 1:22 pm · Filed under uncategorized
Been in self tech support hell lately. A couple weeks ago, a power outage switched off my external drive in the middle of it being used which destroyed the file hierarchy. For various reasons it took about a week to recover all the data which didn’t live elsewheres. I restored the hard drive and copied everything back on to it.
Then just a couple days ago, my laptop froze up and then refused to boot again. I launched it in firewire target disk mode — which thankfully worked — attached it to Nifer’s machine, and backed up everything in my home folder to my external. Then I rebooted with a bootable DiskWarrior cd and set it to repair. This seemed to work. My machine booted, I immediately installed superduper and did a full clone of my laptop.
The next day, it froze again. I ran DiskWarrior again and it repaired a couple useless permissions but that was about it. Interestingly, it would boot in safe mode fine, but normal boots always resulted in either a generic lockup or this lovely corrupt stack kernel panic message: 
Last night, I tried doing a fresh install of the operating system just in case. Unfortunately, the install process just errored out every time.
At this point, it’s looking like a hardware issue, so tonight I’ll run TechTool on it.
I’m glad I can do my own tech support, but I really wish I didn’t have to — I don’t have time for this.
UPDATE: TechTool was worthless as it said everything was peachy. I tried removing the one 3rd party RAM chip I have in there and sure enough that seems to have done the trick so far. Install completed fine and it loaded alright. Now I’m just restoring block-level from my superduper backup as I figure it wasn’t a software problem.
I’ll need to get some more RAM though as 256MB is just not enough. Interestingly it says lifetime warranty on the chip so I’ll have to look into that.
September 18, 2007 at 11:46 am · Filed under Design & Web Geekery
Um wow, just wow. What the hell were they thinking.
Microsoft’s new promotional site for MacOffice2008 was launched today (thanks to Daring Fireball for the heads up). Go ahead and visit. All you’ll see is a blank black page with a small footer bar.
“Why is there no content?” you might ask. Well cause the idiots built the entire thing in flash and didn’t bother to include any loading bars. But it worse than that: after the interface finally loads, the first page requires a 4+ MB download and then whenever you click any of the navigation along the top it also has an additional download of 3-11MBs per tab.
It’s the first day and most likely the site is getting slammed, and with those gigantor flash files that’s not a good thing for their poor server. My browser took over 10 minutes to load the damned thing. And now checking back, it’s completely hosed and none of the content is loading. I can’t even look at the pages I’ve seen before because the flash files are too huge for Firefox to bother keeping in it’s cache.
Correction: Oh hey that download crapout might actually my connection here at work. They recently lamely started throttling youtube traffic, and I just realized that it probably actually applies to all large flash files. As a result, the macoffice site doesn’t load for me. This doesn’t change the fact that an all flash informational site this size is still stupid.
It’s the worst example of a bloated Flash site I’ve ever seen. I can’t get exact figures since I can’t even reach it at the moment, but I’m guessing it all total it’s at least 50MBs — the size of a small application or an HD movie trailer.
July 18, 2007 at 5:34 pm · Filed under Design & Web Geekery
We now have enough Apple gear at our house to be classified as an official House of Jobs Worship. On Sunday mornings, every lap is often bejeweled with a shiny brushed aluminum laptop, and the air is crisp with etheral wifi signals speeding to the airport altar. If there was any doubt of our cult status, the new iphones solidly put us over the edge.
It’s been a few days so far with the device, so I guess it’s time for a review…
Read the rest of this entry »
March 9, 2007 at 6:18 pm · Filed under Life, Meaning, & Selfhood
I got my laptop back on Wednesday. New hardrive, superdrive, and lcd screen all for the low low price of $0 thanks to the extended protection plan. Loaded it up to the tiger welcome screen. I would have mistaken it for a new machine if it wasn’t for all the scratches on the frame—things in my life tend to take a beating. If a well loved book shows its love through it’s broken spine, bent corners, and stained pages, then my laptop is well loved.
Now that I have my personal machine back, there’s a couple larger posts burning to get out of my brain. However they may have to wait considering that I have a test in my Cognitive Development class on monday, and I have to prepare for the NACHRI conference that I’m presenting at next week, and there’s also Saturday’sDustfish Massive party that can’t be missed.
February 28, 2007 at 12:48 pm · Filed under uncategorized
My laptop hard drive finally clicked it’s last clack last night. Luckily, I had the presence of mind to back it up this weekend when it was showing signs of trouble.
As a result, this blog may be a bit on the quiet side while my laptop is in the shop.
