Crash !

On Sunday morning I got up and couldn't get my MacBook Pro's screen saver to stop. I had a spinning beach ball instead.

Force-quit didn't deliver any relief so I did a hard reset.

When it restarted, it got as far as the Apple logo, then crashed. I tried three more times and the same result. I tried booting from Tech Tools pro DVD I have but it was a few months too old to boot the new MacBook Pro.

Next, I booted from my Snow Leopard DVD. Ran Disk Utilities and repaired the disk. Or tried. The first repair attempt quite halfway through and the second quit right away. The drive name disappeared, replaced my a default machine name.

I had to reformat the hard drive even to install Snow Leopard.

This would have been a disaster, but I'd been using Time Machine to back my laptop up to a 2TB external hard drive. Except for having to drive to work to get the drive, it was amazingly easily.

When the OS X install finished, an option screen came up asking me if I wanted to transfer data from another mac or restore from a time machine backup. I plugged in the USB drive and two and a half hours later, I was up and running and I'd lost a total of one day's work (time machine incrementally backups once an hour when I'm plugged in at work).

That's pretty great- one day of lost work and that's it.

Time Machine rocks.

The Amazing Technology in Our Lives

In another non-athletic post, I really struck me over the last twenty-four hours how much technology has changed- in this case for the better, our or at least my life. Offered in no particular order are some examples:

1) I watched the inauguration today, live, while sitting in my office- and watching my 'friends' react on Facebook. As a bonus, I also got to watch Yo-Yo Ma perform. Slam-dunk!

2) While watching A Christmas Carol with Patrick Stewart last night (an excellent, faithful adaptation with a stellar performance by Stewart), I was struck (as anyone who has seen the movie would be) by one unfortunate choice- the ghost of Christmas Yet-to-Come is presented as a mutant giant Jawa. Curious how many others had the same thought, I Googled 'Patrick Stewart Jawa' before Scrooge had consigned himself to the ghost's care and was rewarded with the answer. Quite a few people...

3) My wife watched the inauguration at Pfizer on BBC News.

4) Tonight, tired of ABCs fascination with the Inaugural Balls, I turned to BBC America, and the presenters immediately and ironically turned to Ted Koppel for his analysis- of the speech and the implications of the moment. He did not mention the balls, because he has a pair...

5) I gave my son a gift for his birthday that he's going to get a lot of use and fun out of that I never saw advertised and knew nothing about until I was looking on Amazon for things he might like. It was shipped to me free and delivered in 48 hours.

iTunes and Device Control- Another Opinion

One of my big theories about the internet is that it's always hard to evaluate anything based on what's written on the internet. People who really like things seem to be slugs for the most part, while the haters out there seem to have a ton of energy.

Now don't get me wrong. I hate the record companies as much as the next guy. I'm also a pragmatist. The iTunes store would never have happened without DRM, and the DRM (FairPlay) has never caused me a problem. I've never been unable to play a song when I wanted to and where I wanted to. And I'm way outside the curve. I actually have 5 computers that get daily use- a MacBook Pro, a MacBook, a G5, a Mac Mini, and an HP PC of dubious origin.

The MacBook Pro has, for the entire time I've had it, been my primary iTunes box. It's the machine all my iPods, my iPhone, and my MacTV are linked to. It's also dead as a doorstop due to an odd series of circumstances. I wasted no time moving my portable needs to the MacBook, but with the MacBook Pro on its way to Texas to get some Applecare, I didn't want to set the MacBook up as my iTunes home. For one thing, the hard drive isn't big enough. For another, if the MacBook Pro does come back alive I don't want to have to do all that work twice.

Now, if you don't set iTunes up properly, when you sync your iDevice, it will wipe out whatever is on it and replace it with whatever you've told iTunes to autofill the device with from that computer- usually nothing.

But if you do set it properly, you can still plug in, get a charge- and transfer all the purchased items from the iTunes store that are on it to the computer, but only if you want to.

That device control- which usually gets knocked as a DRM-centric, crippling liability- actually has allowed me to keep my devices charged and full of their own music, and not have to cross-pollinate the different iTunes libraries that are divergent on my different computers.

I like it. I don't feel crippled. i just feel like I have the control that I want.