Month: January 2005

Best feature ever

My new 17″ PowerBook arrived today. Vicki knew I couldn’t wait, so she phoned me while the FedEx guy was still there and I rushed home to get it. It’s the most beautiful piece of computing hardware I’ve ever seen in my life.

Apple has put the coolest feature ever in it, because the beauty of their OS. After I’d decided to order it, I was making mental notes of what to do to transfer everything I need off the old one onto this one. But a friend clued me in: I didn’t need to bother. Instead, when I booted it up, it asked me if I was upgrading from a previous computer. I clicked “Yes”, and it said to connect a firewire cable betwen the two computers. I did, and then it said to boot the old computer with the “T” key held down. It took me three tries, because the first two times I did a “Restart” from the menu – when I took Rob’s advice and powered it down and then booted with the “T” key, I got the Firewire logo on the screen on the old Powerbook, and the new Powerbook recognized it. It showed me all the user accounts and gave me the choice to transfer any and all of them, settings, applications, and “other files”. I chose them all, and went to lunch. When I came back, the transfer was done, and it’s amazing – even the files are arranged the same way on my desktop.

I’ve tried a few of the most important applications and they work fine – Quickbooks has all my account information, Photoshop Elements works, Firefox complains that it can’t reach my home pages (no network connection here at work). A couple of problems – PostgresSQL seems to be installed but not started up (and I can’t remember the PostgresSQL password), jikes isn’t installed at all (although fink is, amazingly enough), the kernel module that maps the caps lock to control doesn’t load, and X11 doesn’t start. Shouldn’t take long to fix those things up.

All I can say is SWEEEEEET. I’ll probably put some pictures of it up on my picture gallery soon.

Web proxy stupidity

At work they force us to use a web proxy. One of the things they do with this web proxy is block access to “inappropriate” web sites. Kind of embarassing when somebody sends you a URL and you paste it into your browser only to find that it’s blocked with the category “Adult Content” – especially since your manager gets a report of blocked sites you attempted to visit. Recently, I’d hit a bunch of sites that are blocked with the category “Music”, and an explanation that they’re blocking music sites because streaming and downloading music is taking too much bandwidth. Ok, I was actually looking for lyrics for songs I’m listening to on my iPod, but ok, not a big problem. (Usually now I remember to use the Google cache to look them up instead.)

At least it wasn’t a problem until I came back from lunch and hit “Refresh all tabs” on my browser, only to find that The Register is blocked as a “Music” site. WTF? Then somebody sent me a link to a story in The Guardian, and it’s blocked as a “Music site”. Putting two and two together, I tested and found that the other “The Register” link still works, and it appears that every .co.uk site is blocked.

The “access denied” message says you can get it unblocked if you can produce a business case why you need it unblocked. Hard to make a business case for The Register or The Guardian. But I discovered another site that’s blocked – our own company’s UK division. Hmmmm.

Paul’s rules of life, #1

Taking a page here from Tina Marie’s blog, I present #1 in my rules of life:

It doesn’t matter how many fun and interesting people you’ve worked with and for in the past, if you write a bunch of reminiscences about past job experiences, the only person who will find your blog and email you about it is the guy you called a dick.

Oh, and Mike? While your reasons for choosing Microsoft products were probably more valid than I gave you credit for in that blog entry, and I’m really really sorry you’ve got leukemia, I still think in many ways you were a dick. Maybe I should have mentioned some of your redeeming qualities, but hey, this was about me, not about you. I liked you as a person for the most part, but it was your management style and skills that made me think of you as a dick. As for your Quake skills – the consensus over in developer row was that we should change your model to a pup tent with a fire in front of it.

In the good news, my new Powerbook just got scanned at the FedEx facility in Harrisburg PA! This is going to be better than watching my last Powerbook go through FedEx faciliites in Asia.

SWEEEEEEET!

Email recieved a few minutes ago:


Dear Apple customer,

Thank you for ordering from the Apple Store! We’re happy that you visited and shopped at our online store, where you can find a great selection of Apple products.

…

PURCHASE INFORMATION

ORDER

Part Number: M9462LL/A
Product Name: PowerBook 17″ 1.5GHz SuperDrive
Estimated time to ship: Same business day

…

Part Number: M8853LL/A
Product Name: APP for PowerBook (w/ or w/o display) – Enrollment Kit
Estimated time to ship: 1-2 business days

Ok, leaving aside questions about why they can ship a PowerBook the same business day, but take 1-2 days to ship a piece of paper, I can’t wait. My poor old battered but beautifully decorated 15″ PowerBook is giving me problems keeping the charger making connection, plus it’s just too damn slow.

Now I have to figure out how to transfer all the music I bought from ITMS on the old laptop to the new one.

At least once I have a replacement in hand, I can re-epoxy the replaced hinge and not be tempted to open it up before it’s had a good two days to cure.