Rising from the Ashes:

Once again I found myself with a Dead Mac. So far I can blame bad ram, bad cd-rom, a really flimsy and corrupted file system, and a bad hard drive to the list of reasons why I have stared at a perpetually spinning gear on startup. The most frequent offender is the flimsy file system. No problem, I'll just fire up the OS install disk and run Disk Utility. That fixes everything!

Not this time, pal. You are facing a special challenge when two different disk repair tools tell you that your drive is screwed and to run for it. I followed Disk Utility with a new copy of Disk Warrior. I had to upgrade to the latest version to get Intel CPU compatibility. The 3.x version I kept at work never saved me under previous file system failure either. That's $200 buck the folks at Alsoft are spending right now, laughing at me.

The great thing about Apple keeping the hardware to themselves is that everything really does work. You can take a dead laptop, and hook up a USB hard drive that only has 8 GB of free space on it, and install the OS, and somehow magically read the internal drive, the very drive that isn't working well enough to start the laptop on its own. I snooped around and checked the system against my last backup and hand picked a few files to make extra copies of before nuking the system from orbit.



Fear not, armed with Apple's Time Machine you can do no wrong. Buy yourself a usb drive and hook it up every few days. If your computer is stationary, leave it connected. Turn on Time Machine and you'll probably never lose data again. Once I wiped the drive, I started the OS install, and during the process you can choose to import your data from a Time Machine backup. After everything completes, the computer matches is as good as new. Well, not new, but as good as the last backup. Zero data loss here.

Here is my free advice. Use a Western Digital MyPassport drive for your backups. They are nice and small, very durable, and can be had at this time in capacities up to 640GB. I use the Elite model, well, because let's face it, I'm as elite as you can get. This year they are going to be Black Friday Ads at a few stores, so check your papers.

If you are running windows, fear not, there is hope for Vista and Windows 7, each of them have their own built in backup utilities that can run on a schedule. A few minutes of googling will find you a nice configuration guide.

It's Let's Bring Em Home Time!

Around this time last year I asked everyone I know to pass on a few half-caf double mocha grande zip zap cappucinos and devote that money to something useful.

It's time to mention Ernie Stewart and crew from www.lbeh.org. A charity dedicated to getting enlisted troops home for the holidays.

I just made my donation and I ask you to do the same.

If the internet is slow for you this week:

First of all, I'm back. I took October off to keep my brain from melting due to work. Cisco CallManger kicks ass, and Mitel can blow me. And so can all of their Atlanta support guys.



Secondly, the internet will be crushingly slow this week because the Left 4 Dead 2 pre-load has unlocked on Steam. This is going to be the best first person shooter ever. It has to be to trump the original.

Steam kicks ass. It's great for so many reasons. Online achievements and social networking, Online game distribution. Seriously, screw going to a store. Never again. Hard drive full, just move your Steam folder to a new drive and launch Steam.exe from the new location and it will fix all of your shortcuts. Not only can you buy games online, you can pre-order. And as with the case today, you can download the game before release so you have the bulk of the material when it unlocks on release day, save for the rare update.

I almost wrecked when I saw this one

Ever see the Red Rocket Episode of South Park?

Yeah I bet.

Saw this one on the way home a little while back.

Hey, uh, you might want to check that lock!

Click the pic to see what's wrong.

Natalie is Pretty Awesome

Last night I was working on my phone. It uses a SD Micro card. I use a SD Card adapter to read micro cards on my laptop.

I left my SD adapter with an SD Micro in it on the table in the den when I called it a night.

In the morning the card was gone, in the typical way that the den gets destroyed when Natalie is playing.

I asked her if she saw it, and she knew what I was talking about, but didn't know where the conversation is going.

Later in the day I asked Lisa to check around the den for it, hopefully it was under the couch/chair/dog instead of in Lindsey's stomach. No luck finding it.

Lisa asked Natalie about it and she went to the kitchen and pointed to my laptop. She clearly knew that the thing we were looking for was used with the laptop. But how did she know that?

Then tonight I just happened to need my laptop to burn a CD.
Lo and Behold:

Not only did she find the SD adapter, she put where she thought it belonged, which happened to be in the cd tray on my laptop.