Jeremy Chase

I’m sure everyone of my loyal readers was very sad to hear that my mac freaked out. All 4 or 5 of you.

After doing a total wipe and reinstall the computer seems to be working perfectly again. I lost all my configuration, but managed to salvage most of my data. This isn’t that big of a deal since many of my documents are ‘in the cloud’ anyway, and it wasn’t that big a deal to reconfigure everything. Mostly just frustrating.

What have I learned from this? Mostly to keep a backup of what I’m doing. Also I learned that a Mac is really quite sensitive, and a freakout is potentially right around the corner. You should have this attitude about any laptop though, since you could easily drop or lose it. I now have a backup plan so the next time it won’t be so painful!!

Macs are nice, and I prefer my Macbook pro to my windows or linux box. However, macs are not magical devices free from problems. The latest disaster that is my mac started this morning.

I figured I should do a “System Update”. This seems like a good idea right? There were two items, Quicktime and iTunes 8.0 to update. This update all seemed to go pretty well, but then my computer was acting really slow. I opened Activity Monitor and nothing was happening. Top showed the same. What gives?

Well, the logs showed that the dynamic library loader was crashing. This is very bad, and went on for about 3 hours. I then saw another update in my System Update thing, 10.5.5! Oh joy! All my problems will be solved. The update began install, and asked me to reboot. It is doing its thing and then it says something to the affect “Update failed, please contact your software vendor.”

I tried this a few times, same thing every time.

So then I got out my install disk, and tried to see if I could do something. There are a lot of diagnostics and other useless things that don’t tell you much. I resigned to just reinstalling, and tried the “reinstall” with archive option. Guess what? That failed too. I even tried it twice.

Right now, I borrowed David’s backup harddrive and copied some of my files to it. Then I started an install that totally erases everything. Lets hope this actually works.

The first thing that makes me crazy about OSX is that once you have minimized a window you can’t get back to it. Well, you can get it back up if you drag the mouse over the Dock, but you can’t alt-tab back. Actually this works sometimes, but only if it was the last window minimized(Or something).

The second thing that makes me crazy about OSX is that you can’t cut and paste in the finder window. That means there is no way to move a file from one place to another unless you have a finder window open in both directories. Mac lovers say that you can simply click and hold, then drag this to the folder you want to put it. This works, but not if that other folder you want to drop to is on a different drive, and even if it did would you want to have to navigate through every folder by waiting while holding this silly button?

Oh, the button. Why is there only one button? Can anyone give me a good reason? The only answer I hear because it is elegant and clean design: simplicity.

However the elegant simple design also comes with four function buttons. My keyboard has “fn”, “control”, “option”, and lets not forget “command”. So far I haven’t figured out why you’d need more than two, but hey, it’s elegant simple design.

Jeremy Chase

Macs are silver, and weird.

The Sunday before last I got a work computer; specifically I got a Macbook Air. I got this model because I figured I would want something small and light. Don’t get me wrong, this was a great computer, but I hadn’t counted on how much I would like working on a Mac. After all, I hate Apple, so I would have to hate the Mac.. Right?

Well, I was wrong. And I loved it. So yesterday morning I went early to the Apple store and upgraded to a MacBook pro 15″. This new system is a bit of a huge monstrosity, but it is much faster and has a hard drive big enough to last some time.

Actually I’m writing this on my IBM T42p, which feels just as fast and is 4 years old. Go figure.

Jeremy