im sleepy, but not too sleepy, so here’s the latest:
I did the re-install of OSX and everything went swimmingly. I backed up firefox, thunderbird, fonts, and my itunes library. I had discs for all my software, or downloaded it again from the internet. I ran techtool 3 times since then and no weird failures. I also have 10 more GBs of free space and boot up is a whole lot faster. The only minor hiccup seems to be that I forgot to try and backup my Transmit settings, so I have to hunt down my FTP password again. All in all, it went well, and only took a few hours. I’ll say that restarting from scratch on a Mac is definitely much easier than on a PC.
I discovered a couple awesome new tools also. The first is Disk Inventory X, and its kinda like Add/Remove programs in Windows in that you can see how much memory a program is taking up. But its got a cool color coded visual representation too. The other AWESOME tool is iStumbler. It displays wireless networks in a way similar to the way Windows does… sorting them by strength and showing you which are open or protected. I am impressed that the areas where OSX had disappointedly lacked when compared to Windows seem to be made up for by these small useful tools.
Annnnnd the bad news… I had purchased a monitor 7 months ago (a Sceptre 22″ LCD) and it worked great until suddenly the DVI input stopped working. It flickered a bit and then one day just died. So, I tried bringing it back to Microcenter but of course they don’t deal with that crap after 30 days, so I have to mail it out to California to be repaired. In the meantime, since I have a friend who will take it when its repaired, I figure I’ll get myself a new monitor. I found some reviews that said the Samsung 206BW 20″ had great color depth, etc etc. so I decide to give it a go. This time I got the extra Microcenter warranty for 25 bucks. I bring it home, open the package, plug it in, turn it on, and nothing. NOTHING AT ALL. Not even a self-test or blinking power light. It’s dead . The world hates me. Now I get to go wait in the returns line AGAIN, but at least this time I know I’ll get my exchange no problem. I hope they don’t start remembering me there.
Why does everything have to be so freakin difficult??
Filed under: mac
i ran that techtool product that comes with the apple care package, and the volume structure test failed! and then it says it can fix it but only if i have a version of the software that includes both diagnostic and repair capabilities. for some reason i can’t seem to track this “repair capabilities” software down.
i’d probably just think it was a faulty scan but i also get a lot of weird errors and slowness on boot up. my plan is to just reformat and do a clean OSX install. i’m thinking this might have something to do with my installing and deleting of a boot camp partition.
apparently if you have more than one getURL() command attached to an object, IE executes only one of them. and it’s apparently random too. super.
Filed under: career
6. “hit the ground running” = we sure hope you know what you’re doing because this shit had to get done yesterday.
