I was just watching some TV and a PC World advert came on, advertising the latest cheap laptop.
Two things made me think. First, the man in the ad (selling to a woman…who obviously knows nothing about computers, I’m surprised she wasn’t scared to leave the kitchen(!) (please, lets break some stereotypes please?)) and stated how she didn’t have to buy anti-virus software because it was “pre-installed”. As a Mac user, I would say “oh no, you don’t need anti-virus. Its a Mac!”
Ok, this could start a whole debate on virus’ on mac. Yes I know its not impossible, but I do believe its harder to cause more damage thanks to the Unix/BSD backbone.
The second thing was, the salesman exclaimed at the Intel Core 2 Duo chip that let the user “run more than one application at once, so you can listen to music while surfing the internet”!!!!! WOW!!!! Thats completely amazing. Surely thats never been possible. Has it? Oh wait, thats why people spent years working on memory management in the kernel so that we can do this (names escape me but I’m looking at you, Macintosh developers).
What did I do to make a point? I opened every application I have in my dock. Thats 18 applications plus System Preferences. How well did my laptop run? Fine. So much so that I could even hit Expose and display all my open windows at once. And here’s how it looked.
Even more fun was running this in slow motion by holding Shift. I also noticed a neat feature, that Photobooth continues to update the camera view even in Expose!
On tuesday I took the plunge. I thought I should probably blog this so its here for eternity that it started with me.
So what is the big story? Its my new drink. I was in Coffee Republic on tuesday and thought I would have a Hot Chocolate and I usually have syrup for taste. And today’s choice? STRAWBERRY!
So before the new wave sweeps the nation, you heard it here first. Strawberry Hot Chocolates. Its been approved by a CR employee, and my girlfriend, and its only a matter of time before more people try this, perhaps even prompted by this post.
Its been quoted as tasting like “the strawberry one in a box of Roses”
So enjoy, and leave me your thoughts in the comments
It arrived (and by that I mean I picked it up) yesterday. I have my new MacBook Pro. Its shiney and lovely.
Only problem now, and its a big one. I did a backup to DVD in May 07 (not really got any more robust backup facility) and had my discs sitting around for me, so last night I went to check them out. I put in the first DVD, and up popped Finder.
You inserted a blank DVD. Choose an action from the pop-up menu or click Ignore
WHAT?!?! Its not f£@king blank! I took the disc out and looked, and it had clearly been written to. So I popped it in my girlfriends MacBook and it just span around. Nothing. So I have one old failed backup.
I do have a working DVD of my photo library, but for the time being, only have the music on my iPod (so lost track counts, etc) and my photo library. I have some older backups, but they’re not great.
For the time being, I’m trying various things to save my hard drive. I had a good 50GB in my user folder and i really want to get it back. The next stage of the operation is to remove the drive from the old Powerbook and pop it into a USB enclosure and hope to god something happens. Failing that, I might have to try a data recovery company but I don’t know what that’ll cost.
So for now, my Toshiba MK8025GAS 80Gb hard drive is dead or dying. Sigh
Its official. Its dead. My G4 Powerbook has bit the bullet, on the way to Davey Jones’ locker. A drummer/mac genius confirmed that my hard drive knackered. That combined with the iffy display has lead this machine to the shelf.
Onwards to happier times. A Macbook Pro. Just need to order one. Then wait. Then pray to god I can transfer my files over before it dies.
So I’ll be out of contact for a while until the replacement arrives. So no blog, no feeds, no podcasts, limited emails.
Please spare a thought for all those dead and dying laptops that are destined to gather dust and be forgotten for their new replacement.
I figured it was a good time to do a general whats going on post.
This weekend my gf has gone to a work do so I’m left all alone for the rest of sunday and monday till she gets back. So what do I do? Well I’m currently blogging, been looking at some guitar tabs trying to learn some songs and just get better at playing.
Of course I’m doing this on katie’s Macbook. Why not mine? Because my poor powerbook is suffering again. On friday it started acting really slowly. I thought maybe the swapfiles were just too huge so rebooted, and then it was all downhill. It took forever to boot and was really REALLY slow to respond. I’ve tried a few things to see whats going on, but can’t figure it out. I ran FSCK to see how the disk was holding up, and it seems fine, but it is making these clicking noises all the time. I am just worried that it got wet on thursday and is suffering because of it.
What was thursday? It was the fruit of my hours spent editing video and finding the right music (copyright free of course) for this work thing in the morning, where we had to present “6 star” at our office and i had some clips of people at work to sort out. So I had my laptop with me at the hotel on thursday for the morning, and then we had a surprise event in the afternoon, which turned out to be a fun scavenger/treasure/photo/quiz trail around Birmingham. The biggest worry now is when I ran from Paradise Forum to the ICC/Symphany hall to hunt for answers and of course since the weather has been so crap, it was raining in a biblical sense. So I was running around with my laptop on my back, and I think it might be suffering because of it.
I’ve also had a stressful week at work, making these stupid packs for MR (my consultant). I’ve got about another 8 hours of solid work to do on them, and have already spent about 2 solid days, and wasted mountains of paper, due to changes in the documents being used.
This really isn’t what I want to do with my life. Its a waste of anything good I can do, and its making me miserable. At the moment I can’t leave. Well I can but I need to stick around till I find something else, or at least get my bonus in September. Then I’m out of there and hopefully the financial services for good. Its a soul sucking industry to work in, and when working with soul sucking people, who are completely two faced, and lazy to do their own job, it makes it so much worse. I want to get into IT, or perhaps even the music industry. Of course I wanna continue with the band, but if I could turn it into a way to make money for a living, then great. But for now, its a side plan.
And speaking of the band, we’re still on hiatus while moving happens. I need to speak to James and see how things are going on. I really wanna get back to things. I miss rocking out with loud music. I have been listening to the new Paramore album Riot! recently, and some other rocky stuff, and really want to get some heavy loud sing along songs. And on that side, I’ve got another song writing book. I lost my last one, which means I lost the songs I wrote. One wasn’t great, but I liked the second one, and can’t remember enough to rewrite it. So I think I’ll try some new ones.
And of course, if my laptop was functioning, I would try to record some music for it too.
Now gonna go get some lunch, eat up some left overs, and then going to see a Mac Genius to get a diagnostic and perhaps pick up a new laptop that I really can’t afford.
I'm a blogger, Mac guy, iPhone lover, bass player, job working, pasta and chicken loving kinda guy, You can read my stuff here, and check out the other social stuff below, or subscribe to my FriendFeed to catch everything I do.
