I created another song and got it uploaded to Ourmedia using SpinXpress.
It’s called Wave Goodbye.
I hope you enjoy it.
Or not.
(See Also: A Song at Ourmedia)
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R.I.P. PowerMac
My main Mac, the PowerMac G4 (Quicksilver) is dead. :(
I got it in 2001, so it’s just shy of 6 years old. It was used (and abused) daily, and ran as a server, so it was always on. Still, I think 6 years is a short life for a Mac. I’ve got Apple hardware twice that old that still runs fine. Through the years I upgraded the RAM many times, put in new hard drives, added a second video card, added USB cards, upgraded the optical drive… It was a good machine.
The details are fuzzy, but Saturday night, Dana was using her account, and thanks to “Fast User Switching” was switching it over to my account when it froze with a kernel panic. I figured it was no big deal, as I get a kernel panic about once or twice a year, so we called it a night, and I rebooted it.
I didn’t realize until Sunday morning at 5:30 AM that the Mac never rebooted properly. I could power it off, and then power it back on, but the monitor would never show anything. Panic? Not yet… I tried many, many reboots. I tried zapping the PRAM, removing some of the RAM, disconnecting the hard drives, starting from a DVD, trying another monitor, trying both video cards, and then I even pulled out the processor upgrade card, and put in the original one. Still no luck. It would chime the startup sound, and I could use the keyboard since the PRAM zap worked, but no dice, just dead.
Now was the time to panic slightly. I checked my backup strategy. I had most of the files I needed for clients. They get backed up to an external drive nightly. There was one project missing, which I stupidly had sitting on the desktop instead of in the ‘clients’ folder, but I was pretty sure that was backed up on my iPod as well. (Yay for multiple backup plans!) So my backups were good, but didn’t have everything, just client essentials.
At this point, I carefully removed the two hard drives from the Mac, and connected them to my iBook with the connector from one of my external USB hard drives. It’s all good. No data loss. To be honest, I would have been devastated if I had lost all my data. That’s the irreplaceable stuff. The computer? Sure I loved it, but it’s just a computer. It’s not my digital life.
So now what? My guess is the logic board is dead, which means the Mac is useless. I’ll run with the iBook as my main machine for now, while I formulate a plan. I have a few, I just need to determine which is best.
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Photography
I’m becoming more and more interested in photography. In part, I blame Flickr. (Though I also blame Cory at Z2, from whom I’ve been learning bits and pieces about the process.)
There are so many aspects of “taking pictures” to consider, and for many people it’s just a matter of capturing a moment, and honestly, most of my photos are still the “moment capturing” variety, but lately I’ve been trying to be more conscious of the shots I take, and how (and if) I post-process them.
I’ve noticed that I seem to be writing a bit less, and taking pictures a bit more. You’d think the photos would take less time, but I don’t think that’s the case. I do think that consuming photos happens much faster, as I can keep up with my friends on Flickr, but I’m weeks (or months) behind on most of my blog subscriptions.
I’m also starting to feel the limitations of a cheap digital camera. Even when I get what I think is a good shot, it seems to lack the tonal range it needs to really make the images burst.
Anyway, I’d like to get a better camera at some point, and really start to see what I can do with it. I shot film in the olden days, and really liked it, so it would be nice to have a camera with a bit more control over the input.
Oh yeah, you can see my photos on Flickr, if you care…
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Dear Steve
Over the years I’ve known a lot of people who worked for Apple. (Formerly Apple Computer.) Some have just been acquaintances and some have been friends. Recently, a long time friend of mine went to work for Apple, so asked him to give Steve Jobs a message for me:
Tell Steve to FTFF!
His response:
That’s what is known internally as a "career-limiting action."
Ahhh, that Cupertino Kool-Aid tastes good!
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I Biked to Work (Last Week!)
I mentioned Bike to Work Week last week, because that is when I Biked to Work.
Even though my youngest child did not support me (“What if you don’t make it?” she said) I did it. According to the GPS it was a 7.6 mile ride, and took about 43 minutes. My average speed was around 10 MPH. Going uphill it was around 6 and going downhill it was more like 20. In fact, 24.9 was the fastest I could go.
It was fun, but not something I could do every day, or even once a week. There are so many days when I just need a car. Obviously I can’t bike to work on the days I need to pick up the kids, or have to meet someone in Brookfield or Milwaukee, or whatever. And since I sometimes work long days, I wouldn’t look forward to riding home in the dark after working 12+ hours. Of course, I’m just an excuse-maker.
But it got me thinking… What if I got a scooter? I mean, sure I wouldn’t exactly be getting the exercise, but think of the money I’d save in gas and wear and tear on the old CR-V! This line of thinking lasted about a day, and included looking for used scooters on Craig’s List, and chatting with a friend who knows more than I do. I even tried to do some rough math and figured if I got a used scooter cheap it would pay for itself in car/gas savings after 3 years of riding it to work. I’m insane like that.
I’d like to try biking to work again this year, and the crazy scooter idea is on the back-burner for now, unless you know someone who wants to trade one for some freelance web development and hosting.