Last nights rebuilding of Marbles the macbook was a surprisingly easy, quick, and pleasant experience thanks to my recent work with bash scripts for syncing. In the past 6 months I’ve written a number of syncronization scripts to help keep my notebook up to date with my desktop machines and ensure that no matter what machine I’m using it always has the most recent version of my data.
All this scripting paid off via the side benefit of making the rebuild almost entirely painless. It look less than an hour to reinstall OS X 10.4.1 from the DVDs that came with Marbles and then run software update to get it upgraded to 10.4.9. Once that was done I hooked into the gigabit network, copied over a few applications, ran my update script and Marbles was back in action.
I remember back in my Windows days how rebuilding a machine and moving data over could be a day long saga - no more of that for me though - an hour and some Unix hackery is all you need now!
Now I just have to keep my fingers crossed that rebuilding fixed whatever system corruption I had that was causing the system hangs to begin with.
Wednesday, March 21, 2007
My struggles with the new Apple 802.11n drivers continue. After several weeks of kernel level hangs (from securityd failing to work properly with the new driver) and two patches I think it’s come down to one of the early hangs must have hosed a low level component. Since I don’t care about any of the data on my Macbook (it’s really just a mirror of my desktop anyway) I’m blowing it away and reinstalling the OS from scratch. I know it’s very much like using a cruise missile to kill a mosquito, but system crashes annoy me enough to spend an evening setting my laptop back up to hopefully get back my stability. If this fails then I’m chalking it up as bad hardware and taking it straight back to Apple to let them deal with it.
Wednesday, March 21, 2007
It’s been a crazy and fun week! I’ve been keeping myself busy with all sorts of things - my dad passed through town and I’ve gone on a few dates. Dad being in town was great - he is on his way to up Abbotsford to see my Grandpa and stopped by to stay the night last night on his way. As always it was nice to see him, and I’ll be seeing him and the rest of the family this weekend when I drive up to join them at my grandpa’s house.
I’ve also gone on a few dates recently! In the past few years I’ve been either dating Brien, or not dating at all. Not dating sure is an easy solution to relationship problems, but it’s not necessarily a good one. As with all things “long forgotten” it can be hard to get back into the dating scene. I almost feel like I’ve forgotten how to meet new people.
Dating is such a funny concept any way - It seems somewhat forced and contrived by our society. I’m certainly in favor of hanging out with friends, but often if a friendship (or a new acquaintance) suddenly gets the ‘date’ label applied to it something changes. It becomes less casual, more formal, more examined. I don’t know if becoming less casual is necessarily a bad thing, but I don’t see why the whole concept cant be relaxed into simply hanging out and having fun with someone rather than putting huge labels and expectations on it. If things work out and it gets serious then great, if not who cares - you made a new friend.
Oh well - hopefully something good will come of it soon enough, and I’ll just keep enjoying the dates as they come.
Early this afternoon I went with Brien to the Cinerama to go see 300. It’s another Frank Miller graphic novel brought to life. The topic is the Battle of Thermopolae, and while the movie is light on substance it’s a beautiful flick with great art direction. Having 300 hot, dirty, sweaty men running around covered in their ex-enemies never hurt either!
In other news I still love my car. I wish the weather would start cooperating so I can give him a bath and do a proper photoshoot with my DSLR. For now the following shot from last Wednesday will simply have to do:
“A6 front grill” by sparktography
Wednesday, March 14, 2007
Am I really getting that old? I finally had my fill of sporty cars and decided that I should trade my GLI in for something a little more comfortable for the commute. University Audi was kind enough to hook me up with a simply stunning used Audi A6 with all the goodies:
Sadly thanks to the rain this morning it’s already filthy and I haven’t even had it for a full day yet! Light coat of mud aside I’m really happy with it - it’s big, comfy, and exuding leather and wood from every nook and cranny. It’s certainly a different experience to drive than my GLI was - it glides along rather than hugging the road and screaming like a bat out of hell.
Next thing you know I’ll start wearing starched shirts and buy a house just so I can yell at kids to get off my lawn!
I’m always behind the bandwagon on adopting Yahoo’s recent acquisitions but I finally picked up Del.icio.us. Del.icio.us is a social networking and tagging site for URLS. It’s kind of like Digg (although predates it by years), but with much more of a focus on tagging things.
Do you use Del.icio.us? Add sparktography as a friend, or just check out links I’ve tagged.
Taken for Photogamer Challenge #4. The invasion is on it’s way. You don’t see this animal every day… yet!
Viva La GNR Revolution!
“Coming soon” by sparktography
