For no apparent reason, the Airness developed a little disk issue. I was going to pack the Airness down to the Apple Store and say “Fix It” or email the son-in-law and say “what now?”
But, I decided that I should be able to RTFM and repair it myself. (It was surely a software issue.) Which I did. Everything seems fine now – but, I’ll keep my backup current and check the file structure at least once a day for a while.
Maybe the Airness has jet lag? I have over 2,000 images to cull down to say maybe 500 with say 50 to print into a book. What I really need is a powered USB hub. 128Gig isn’t a very big drive. And the Airness just has one USB port. Honest, Mr Jobs, I would have tolerated another, say 2 ounces for a second USB port.
Major travelers remorse is setting in. What am I doing leaving my expensive tranquil almost penthouse apartment? Why am I going to a strange land with tiny hotel rooms and squatty potties. What on earth am I going to do with a 17 year old?
The only question I have an answer to is the 17 year old. The only thing I can do is treat the 17 year old like a civilized grown up human person.
Today I moved all the old photos and extra stuff off the Airness. Fired up TimeMachine. Treated myself to a couple of audiobooks. Going to Japan, I don’t imagine I need to take extra SD card or computer stuff. Should be able to buy all manner of hardware.
Speaking of hardware. Went to Pentagon City this afternoon. The Apple Store is right next door to the Sony Store. The Apple Store was stuffed with buyers. Packed. The Sony Store – which sells Sony computers and camera was empty. Well, except for a few folk who were watching Soccer on a Sony TV that the store had setup. Note to self. Next market meltdown – put AAPL on the shopping list.
Today, Carlton is the Housing Officer. He is liking a really expensive place. It has a view of the Washington Monument out of the kitchen window. Well, out of the living room and one of the bedrooms too. But, I tend to focus on the kitchen. The place is expensive – but basically you are paying for the view. That works for me.
He didn’t sign on the dotted line. Tomorrow is another day. In his role as Housing Officer, he also unleased a real estate lady. I am scared of real estate ladies. I would never unleash a real estate lady.
And, what is overstuffed – the Airness is overstuffed. I had to offload some stuff to the USB Drive. The Airness has a 128 gig solid state drive and it doesn’t take too much iTunes and too many photos to get things a little cramped.
After this move: flat tvs, FIOS, real end tables – vice milk crates and maybe a Mac Mini are on tap. Have you noticed what your CDs are paying these days? Might as well spend the money. A penny saved is a penny wasted.
I downloaded a new beta of Lightroom 3. It seems a little faster. But, I just moved all my fotos to the external drive – so who knows?
We had a shortage of sun today. But, I needed a day off from glorious weather.
Today’s non-fun was provided by the heretofore faithful Airness. I turned it on about mid-day and it started fussing that the computer date was earlier than the actual date. And all sorts of processes that I didn’t recognize started whining about lack of access to this or that. And when I tried to get to the internet Safari and Firefox both fussed about “certificate” problems.
Now, if this were a PC – I’d suspect a virus. But, hey this is a Mac. Macs “just work”. This was not “just working”. And, I don’t have a clue where to start trying to get the bad boy going again. Ok. Manually set the date and time. Turn off the wireless. Power down and make coffee. Drink coffee. Restart. Well, that stopped all the fussing. A little research and I discover that some evil power screwed up a bunch of the file permissions. I pushed the “fix-em” button and everything seems to be better. But, I am not a happy person since I haven’t a clue as to what happened.
I seem to be making myself at home – not in Kona – but in the new computer.
Reference the junky desktop. I try to keep it nice and clean. I would love to have a zen-like desk top (and a zen-like apartment) but it isn’t going to happen.
I am starting to think-Mac more often. The Mac OS is not perfect. But it is stable. I find that more often than not Safari is my browser of choice. Not a preference – I prefer Firefox, but Safari is quicker. Quicker is better.
Did my part to help the Chinese economy. I bought a wetsuit. That which is called a “Shorty Spring Suit” in surfing circles. But, it might be a few days before I give it a test. Big surf is supposed to be coming in – and big surf is not good for snorkeling.
Speaking of big surf – it might be big enough to “run the Eddie”. The Eddie Aikau is a big surf contest that is only run seven times since 1985, because 30 foot waves are required. The most recent contest was in December 2004, when waves reached 30 to 50 feet. The contest only invites 24 big-wave riders and no jet ski tow in allowed. The Eddie – Check it out. The Eddie is not held on our island – but we follow it on TV. If it happens.
$6.85 + shipping for 10 servings of toilet paper. What ever happened to taking about 1/3 of a roll from home and jumping on it to flatten? And, boys and girls – if you are in a place where you need to byo-tp – you are going to need a boatload more than 10 servings.
I really wanted to play with the Mac version of PrintScreen. I think it was cmd+shift+4.
Another thing I don’t need. DeathSwitch. Check it out. I do worry a little bit about what would happen it I get hit by a bus (A possibility for urban persons). Someone will have to get everything converted back to snail mail bills and checks for Mr C.
It finally stopped raining. Now, if the goddess could make it a little warmer please. Where is global warming when you need it?
Very bad stuff at the grocery this morning:
Ice Scrappers on sale $1.97 and
Fruit Cakes. Maybe they were left over from last year.
Big event today is Handbreaking some movies. Will stash them on the removable hard drive. Then if we get bored silly in Hawaii, we’ll have some movies.
Doing the Handbreaking on the Ubuntu machine. Each one takes about 10 hours. But, I am in no rush. Figure I can do 2 a day and we are not leaving for 20 days. I’ll pick out some and let Mr C pick out some. He does not share my love of 1950’s sci-fi. (Either movies or written).
First movie: Dr Strangelove.
As for The Airness – I have had it about a month. And, I like it. I’d like it more if it had a 256 GB SSD. But, I’ll just have to use the gigabytes that I have carefully. I like the form factor too. The lightness makes it easy to pass over to Carlton to see this or that. The 13 inch screen is gracious. And the keyboard is almost as good as the classic IBM Thinkpad keyboard. And, it plays nice with the old Dell box. Very long range plan is to replace the Dell box with either a Mac Mini or iMac. I have no plans to “upgrade” XP to Windows 7. I paid my dues with the HP Vista 64-bit Whore Machine.
I wonder how many more of these gotcha’s are hiding in my new machine?
But, The Time Machine thingie worked as advertised. So, only one photo got lost. And it was no loss.
I still haven’t decided how to catalog, cull, process, organize, etc etc images on The Airness. A whole bunch of images are cataloged using Photoshop Elements over on the XP part of the Dell Box.
I really liked my 30 day trial of Lightroom last summer. I would spring for my very own copy. $299. But, I am in lust with an as yet unavailable camera. It is supposed to ship with a copy of Lightroom. I could use getting a copy of Lightroom to help justify the cost of the camera.
Photoshop Elements for PC used to have vastly superior cataloging abilities over the Mac version. But, I haven’t checked out the current release. PSE is a fine enough program – but it is long on cute scrapbooky features. And, it has a distressing habit of needing frequent expensive upgrades.
I really really miss Irfanview. That would be the great freeware swiss army knife PC image viewer/editor/tweaker. It doesn’t work gracefully with WINE. Someone should take up a collection and pay Irfan Skiljan to port Irfranview to the Linux/Mac world.
I have poked around with iPhoto which comes with The Airness. I didn’t feel the love. At least not yet. Maybe it will grow on me being “free”.
And, I just installed Picasa. The Linux version was some sort of strange package that come with a special version of WINE and the Windows version of Picasa. I think that the Mac version is “pure”. Don’t know. Just guessing.
OUCH, I just learned a valuable Mac lesson. In Windows and Ubuntu Land, I pop my camera memory card into the computer and drag the folder with the photos onto the desktop. I did that with The Airness. Then after I take more pictures, I do that again. Well, boys and girls, in PC/Linux Land – your old pictures remain. Not so with the Mac. It REPLACES the old folder with the new one. Completely and totally deleting any other pictures that were in the folder. So, I just lost 15 pictures. I am thinking that 14 of them are in “The Time Machine” – but one in lost forever. It was today’s Fall View from the balcony. No big loss. Big lesson learned at little cost. And, we’ll see if that time machine thingie works.
But, today’s main event was a trek downtown to take in the Gay Rights March. I am sure there were some ugly homophobic protesters somewhere. I only encountered thousands of cheery marchers.
Dueling iTunes. The latest version of iTunes makes it really easy for two or more computers to share iTunes libraries and to copy music from one to the other.
Note to Peg: Last night’s Chubby Chicky was really good. I am sure I’ll forget what I did by the time I buy another whole chicken. So, here it is for me.
Wash and dry a whole chicken. A chubby chicky if you will.
In the pot that Carlton found in the trash room – brown up any veggies that need using up.
Stick any herbs that are lying around inside the chicky and season up the out side with pepper, cumin, etc. Lots of seasonings.
Brown the breast side of the chicken. Then turn it over and brown up the backside.
Seal up pot with foil.
Put lid on top, and put in 260 degree oven.
Put iron skillet on top of lid.
Cook 4.5 – 5 pound chicken about 90 minutes.
I am now in tropical mode. Carlton was interested in going to Tonga this year and I was interested in Samoa. But, they have both been hard hit by earthquakes over the past week. Bora Bora anyone?
Mac’s have a thing called the “time machine”. It is supposed to be a wonderful backup system. Well, I have had nothing but BAD luck with any backup system except me personally shipping my personally selected files off to a floppy, cd, dvd, thumb drive, external drive, whatever. No microsoft based “system recovery”, ghosting scheme, backup software ever saved my butt. For a couple of years – I had an automatic cloud based backup system. And, at the very same time as my HP Vista Whore Machine melted the motherboard – taking the disk with it – my cloud based backup system had a massive server failure – and nothing could be retrieved. I was still backing up to dvd and/or the external drive – so, I didn’t lose very much.
Son-in-law encouraged me to give The Time Machine a try. So, I dusted off the external drive that I consider the most trust worthy and turned it into my Time Machine. Sooner or later, I’ll try to get some sort of wireless Time Machine going. Using my existing parts. One can buy a cute little Apple box for $499 that will do the job. But, where is the fun in that?
I am trying to be modern. I started using WordPress – no long doing a roll your own website. Now, I am trying out Time Machine and the whole Mac-thing. Progress.
Chicken for dinner tonight. A chubby chicken is in the oven.
After a morning designing forms at the hospital – paperwork is my life – I decided that is was time to get The Airness connected to the rest of the computers in the house. It now happily plays with the elderly XP systems and uses the XP’s old HP printer. I did have to download a new printer driver – but nothing to that. I suppose I’ll try to get it connected to the Ubuntu system next. Should work fine – since the Mac is really a Unix system is designer duds.
Speaking of designer duds. One of the downsides of losing 20 pound is that I now give a shit what I am wearing. What a pain that is! At my time of life, I should be heading off to polyester and elastic waists – or at least The Talbots and Chicos. It isn’t easy to be stylish with my requirement for shoes that you can walk five miles in. And my refusal to frequent the dry cleaners. And my reluctance to shop anywhere except at thrift shops.
