Category: Geekery

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.

Why I run my own blog

Every now and then, especially when I’m facing my own computer problems, I think “why don’t I just give it up and get a Livejournal. And then today every Livejournal page is showing the same text:


Our data center (Internap) lost all its power, including redundant backup power, for some unknown reason. (unknown to me, at least) We’re currently dealing with bringing our 100+ servers back online. Not fun. We’re not happy about this. Sorry… :-/ More details later.

If there’s going to be a massive screwup making my blog unavailable, I want it to be *my* screwup, dammit.

Followup on the hard drive problem two days ago

I booted with the Western Digital Diagnostics floppy that I keep handy, and when I did a quick scan it said it found a problem and asked me if I wanted it to fix it. I did. Then I did the full scan, and it didn’t find any problems. So I booted into Linux single user mode. Couldn’t figure out how to fsck the drives that way, so I booted with the rescue disk. It wouldn’t let me unmount the drives that way, so I booted back into single user mode so I could do a “shutdown -rF now”, which forced it to do a fsck when it booted again. It didn’t find any problems. So now I’m continuing to run my backup process every two hours, and keeping an eye on it. 36 hours later, still no more disk errors.