rickshangle.com

I am acquainted with this guy, Jeffrey T. Meyer, who does a podcast out of Muncie, Indiana called Good Beer Show, and if you like good beer and local music, you should check it out. Not to mention that JT is a good guy.

Jeff and his friends basically sit around a large beer house caller the Heorot, drink and discuss good beer (i.e. not Miller Lite aka “Football Beer”) without pretense, and and listen/talk to local bands. The podcast’s gone from standing still to essentially national phenomenon (in the podcasting world) in around 18 months, so that’s all good.

PodCastAwards.com is having it’s 2nd (3rd? whatever) annual award thing, and Good Beer Show is again nominated in the food/drink category (they won last year).

Go out there every day from July 28th through August 11th and vote for the Good Beer Show. If you don’t feel good about that, how about going and getting the g.d. podcasts, listening to a few, and then voting? While you’re out there, vote for some other shows. Don’t listen to podcasts? No problem… pick a few names at random that sound cool.

Anyway - you’d be doing yourself a favor (if you like indie music and beer and people shooting s**t) to listen to Good Beer Show, but barring that, you’d be doing JT a favor with your vote. DO IT!

Good Beer Show on About.com, so you can get a quick feel that jt and co do not support devilry (any more than the standard person)…

Hot news, to be sure.

My initial impressions:

1. I don’t know how I will ever be able to travel with all this additional weight. I may need to jettison something from my laptop bag to compensate, like the two AA batteries I keep in there for whatever reason may arise.
1. Scrollball is as responsive as the original. That is a good thing. I expect that, as with the original, I will need to harshly clean this one with baby wipes every two weeks to keep it functioning. That, or stop picking my nose and then immediately using the mouse/scrollball.
1. Side-buttons are much tighter than the original. I’ve read (and a friend has mentioned) that the side-buttons on their wired MM were so tight as to essentially be unusable[1], but mine were actually so responsive they tended to go off at times I didn’t want them to. Maybe this is what they’ve been referring to, or maybe it’s just newness.[2] Or maybe they’re jerks.
1. The tracking in general was, until a few minutes ago, awful. Not when compared to Mighty Mouse v.Wired, but in general… as in, to the point of near-unusability. I went into photoshop in order to draw a “straight” line I could paste in here (expecting it to turn out as a sawtooth sine wave), but… then everything started working. Stay tuned, I guess.
1. Urgh - the retuuuuuuurrrrrrnnnn of blluuuuuuuuuetoooooooth keeeeeeyyboaaaarrrddd goingggggg ouuuuut toooo lunnnnnnnch occasionallyyyyyyyyyyy. I guess one wireless mighty mouse is, indeed, one wireless device too many in the pan.

[1] Unless willing to crush/destroy the mouse in the process, which is a funny, sort of corner case of “use”, I guess.
[2] Or maybe said friend, who will be nameless here as to avoid shaming, has the hands of a four year old girl-child

[image source]

Rawrowrowow! Not-Rocker-Aimee-Mann-chick’s points are legit: i’ll be surprised if Supernova, the band (not the show; rockstar!), lasts long enough to name a singer; ie, for twelve more weeks, or whatever.

But if they do, it will be Dilana[1], Aussie Chip[1] or that bald Ron Halford-sort-of-guy[1]. I feel like Lukas is a dark horse now due to his nascent one-dimensionness. Storm Large was never in the running because Tommy Lee would never accept being in a band with someone with a larger member than his wooooooeeeauuuurrrgggggggghhhhhh! woeah!

Last night’s show was boring and unremarkable, as is probably indicated by the fact I can’t remember anybody’s name beyond Dilana, Lukas and TELL ‘EM STORM LARGE SENT YA!.

[1] Voted for him/her five times last night.

[image source]

News flash, overdue:

My friend Neil is the brainchild and driving force (rising force?) behind the Future Rock Hall, a web site that, via combination of user input and statistical secret sauce, aims to predict the likelihood of future Rock and Roll Hall of Fame nominees.

Think Hollywood Stock Exchange, for music, and without (for the moment) virtual money. With commentary. And more than a few dedicated and extremely, uhr, knowledgeable Deep Purple fans.

I think Neil’s idea is extremely cool, since I like things that are representations of lasting and/or eternal truths. Not to mention it is the only place on the web (now, probably forever) where this site appears next to Malcom Gladwell’s on a blogroll. And, again, those deep purple / stevie ray vaughan fans are… committed.

There is a deeper, personal lesson here, I think: Neil’s generally technical (having worked both in publishing and as an architect for over a decade; those are technical professions; his degrees are in architecture), but I never considered him to be in the top tier of techiecomputer / geekness among our friends. Case in point: until last year, I don’t think he ever owned a computer at home during his adult, post-college life. Anyhoo, in March we were talking about the idea for the site, and I think my comment was something pretty deep, like: “yeah. you could totally do it. and people would come to it. for sure. g***mn it, this line for the bellagio buffet is moving slow, and the whiskey from this microflask is going down way too smooth.”

Neil got back home, signed up with a web hoster, sat down and put the site together over a few months. To me, that’s a valuable lesson in triumph of the will. Also, I clearly need to write about Stevie Ray Vaughan.

The site ramped up in April, and this September will be the first year the science can be compared to the voting committee’s nominations.

Tne Future Rock Hall [about] is not associated with the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum.

Geeze, finally.

I was a late jumper re: the Mighty Mouse bandwagon, but since locking in I’ve never looked back. The scrollerball is OOTT[1].

And on the topic[3] - re: said Mighty Mouse scrollerball, and the inevitability of it getting dirty and no longer working:

1. Acquire electronics-friendly moist towelette (ex. monitor-cleaning cloth)
1. Use it to firmly and repeatedly wipe across the scrollerball again… and again… and again…
1. … and again…
1. … until function resumes.

You’ll know (good) things are happening when crud starts to come off of the ball and get picked up by the towelette. Trust me[2].

[1] One of those things.
[2] Caveat emptor.
[3] And this is discussed a lot in the comments for the TUAW article

They being hard drives, the thing to know being when to fail in order to cause maximal TFDL[1].

I don’t mean to assign hard drives some unwarranted malevolent intelligence — it’s always a bad time.

Depending on the level of rigor involved in a data backup process, a lost drive is (for most home users; I’m talking about for human beings, not companies - that’s another story) a time-consumer as you replace the drive and recover the data.

If you’re not so on top of the data protection thing, then the impact can range from inconvenient (time lost reloading everything / recreating lost data that is re-creatable) to expensive (lost music from iTunes music store) to catastrophic (lost pictures from honeymoon that existed only on that drive; just a random example).

Given that I spend half of my professional life thinking about data protection (and the other half thinking about storing/managing data before it gets lost, then recovered; hooray!), it would be a cobbler’s-kid-foot-bare-thing if I didn’t have nominally effective practices in place for protecting critical data. Since my office is my home, this really applies to everything. 2x.

And trust me, I do have policies, and procedures. They’re not as robust as the ones I build and sell to companies, but I don’t have hundreds of thousands-to-millions of dollars to spend on data protection, either.

So I’ll tell you a secret, for free.

Every ten minutes, my PowerMac G5 looks to see if my PowerBook17 is on the network, after determining that the process I am now describing is not already happening.

If G5, which is called trogdor finds the laptop, which is called sm, then it connects to it and starts copying work-related files that have changed (since trogdor is really the main repository of all data, and sm only “checks stuff out”, and brings it all back home.

Trogodor also has about 1.5TB of disk space on it, and sm only has 80GB. Which is another reason why this is this way.

The system works pretty well. Mostly.

Which is why when the hard disk on my PowerBook17 began failing in the middle of a data migration process (getting everything off it in preparation of wiping it and giving it to my wife, my new (and awesome) Mac Book Pro having arrived the day before), I wasn’t particularly concerned about the work-related data on it. Or my writing, or receipts related to stuff I bought on the web, or a ton of other crap. It was all backed up to the mighty trogdor. On more than one physical drive, in some cases.

What I didn’t back up, though, because I am a f’ing idiot, are the honeymoon-related photos that have been sitting on the PowerBook, and only the PowerBook, for the last month or so.

Now, normally all digital photos in the house are imported through my G5 (trogdor), where there is a policy to (you guessed it) back the photo repository up to two separate hard drive automatically, daily.

The whole honeymoon photo thing… the photos were imported into the PowerBook (mid-honeymoon… mid-ocean, actually: we were on a cruise, as I’ve been very slowly describing in these pages; the PowerBook was with us, and the G5 obviously wasn’t)… the PowerBook came home, my wife began immediately turnings the imported photos into books within iPhoto, yada… it just sort of… getting them into the G5, and therefore into the backup policy, just didn’t happen.

So now, since there is a set of data of immeasurable value on this failing disk, I am faced with doing something I would normally never do: roll up my sleeves and become sort of computer forensics-ist in order to recover this, urp - the pain, priceless data.

Some people would be thankful that their work (work-work and non-work-work, i.e. hobbies) stuff is safe and sound. I am not one of those people. I am an animal — a data animal.

What would I do normally, you ask, were all the data confirmed safely backed up?

1. Computer to Apple store
1. “AppleCare. Hard drive. Replace. Ball peen hammer.”
1. fin

Why didn’t I, say, at least post the honeymoon pictures to a web site or something? I messed up. Simple as that.

Moving on / taking action

Ok, on to coaxing data off a dead/dying hard drive that wants to take the data with it to Davey Jones’ (Casey Jones’? Who was in the Monkees?) locker. Things of note:

1. The drive, which is a Toshiba 80GB laptop drive, is not mountable in the Finder. It has a journaled HFS+ partition. That’s it.
1. The drive won’t pass a fsck_hfs (broken sibling link), which means that it’s not going to pass Disk Utility, which is basically a shell into fsck
1. DiskWarrior doesn’t see it. TechTool Deluxe doens’t see it.
1. The finder does indicate, when i put the laptop into Target Disk Mode and plug it into my G5, that an unrecognizable disk is now on the system, what should it do? I tell it to ignore.
1. The drive is not making any grinding / cackling / drooling sounds inside the case; in fact, that whole side of the laptop (the left side) is rather cool, which leads me to believe (at least part of the time) it’s not even spinning up.
1. S.M.A.R.T. (drive auto-diagnostics) on the drive indicate a status of “failing”. No sh*t. That technology sells itself.

Point 4 above qualifies as a very, very faint heartbeat on our patient, so I’m willing to take a (benign) whack at recovery before I send the laptop off to DriveSavers or the like to do their expensive magic.

Since all the jelly-coated Apple tools (provided and 3rd party) that I’m aware of either ignore this drive or can’t do anything with it in its current state, I need to see if there’s any way I can get the data off, on to a more stable (i.e. not-failing) media, for further analysis.

What will I do with the data then, since it looks like at a minimum that the directory on the drive has been cooked? I really don’t know, but we’ll worry about that later. Now, I want to get the data off the drive. I just want it off. It could turn out that the current state of accessible 1s and 0s on the drive is worth a pile of steaming excrement. I just want it off. The warp core is breaching; all the crew on the cruiser may already be dead, but we’re beaming them off. Just in case. I can’t believe I just used a Star Trek analogy; you can see what the stress of this situation is doing to me.

fsck says chunks of the filesystem directory are toast. This means tools. Real tools. Man-tools: block-level tools. Thank dog OS X is UNIX.

Some people have been saying good things about GNU ddrescue, which (from what I can tell) is basically the UNIX dd command combined with some sort of retry&log system, so that when used with failing drives, when the program (inevitably) experience failures during a dd copy process, the log can be used to determine the point of failure and pick up at that point after the drive has been reset / given smelling salts. A checkpoint, if you will.

Whatever. I’m not one to look too deeply into things before charging ahead. I download and compile ddrescue.

>trogdor-5:~/Desktop/ddrescue-1.2 rshangle$ sudo ./ddrescue -v /dev/disk6s3 “/Volumes/Backup0000-0000 1/MyVolImage.dmg”
“/Volumes/Backup0000-0000 1/MyVolRescue.log”
>Password:
>
>
>About to copy an undefined number of Bytes from /dev/disk6s3 to /Volumes/Backup0000-0000 1/MyVolImage.dmg
> Starting positions: infile = 0 B, outfile = 0 B
> Copy block size: 128 hard blocks
>Hard block size: 512 bytes
>Max_retries: 0 Split: yes Truncate: no
>
>Press Ctrl-C to interrupt
>Initial status (read from logfile)
>rescued: 7222 MB, errsize: 914 kB, errors: 5
>Current status
>rescued: 19471 MB, errsize: 914 kB, current rate: 3080 kB/s
> ipos: 19472 MB, errors: 5, average rate: 3420 kB/s
> opos: 19472 MB
>Copying data…

Ok, I know that looks… marginally allright and sort of depressing at the same time. It’s copying the data directly from the drive at the block level (bypassing the filesystem) and dumping what it finds into a file called MyVolImage.dmg.

What you don’t see is that periodically the drive just hangs/locks (as failing drives are wont to do), which means I need to control-c on ddrescue, shut down the laptop (which is in target disk mode), wait a bit, turn it back on (with T held down, for target disk mode), re-attach it to my G5 (where this is all running), and then restart ddrescue. Well, restart is the wrong word — continue. Remember that log I spoke about.

So far we’ve hit about 5 (as you can see) non-recoverable drive errors in 20 or so GB. It’s a pain in the ass, but if I have to experience 4x as many on the path to getting these pictures (if nothing else) off the drive, it will be worth it.

There we are for the moment - we are in scanning mode. ddrescue is churning away. Stay tuned.

and, if this works out, i’ll post all the honeymoon picts to the site. promise.

[1] total f****ng data loss
[2] and, in parallel once that’s done, I want to take the powerbook to the apple store and have a genius replace the drive so I can get to the business of getting the machine operational again

summary:after 2 days light use, computer not so hot as to warp, way too hot for infants to use practically

I’m not a huge puss, allright? I’ve dealt with the rigor of extreme heat on a PowerBook 12″ gen 1… and a PowerBook 17″ gen 2 (currently with failed f****g hard drive I’m attempting to salvage honeymoon pics from; another story). I have the burns, I’ve felt the heat.

All day, all night, I’ve felt, the heat.

Felt, felt, felt, felt the heat.

This MacBook Pro 17″, however, is the first system I’ve had where I can literally say it’s burned me.

Not like “heh, wow… that computer’s really warm || hot!”. As in, “ow!” followed by (several minutes later), “Damn… it still hurts.”

Know what that’s called? A burn. So I now know not to touch any exposed metal in the roughly 9pm-12midnight quadrant of the laptop’s deck (in other words, any exposed metal around the MagSafe, left speaker, the bar above the keyboard F-keys, and ports on the left side of the system).

Really fast, though. Clean. Parallels is great. We’ll deal with that later.

Now, we’ll do the tale of the temp:

Wed, 2PM. In-use 2.5 hrs. Hot, but not too hot

Wed, 8PM. Woah! That left processor is running a little hot. maybe that stabilizer’s broken loose again. R2, see what you can do with it.

Wed, 11PM. Throttle down, throttle down.

note - overnight, i turned the MBP off to avoid mid-night apartment-burnings

Thursday, 10AM. WAAUUUUUGH!

Thursday, noon. Whatevs.

two days of heat: the tale

I’m realizing now I need to be able to graph this against disk / cpu activity. stay tuned.

So, day 2 verdict: laptop operates dangerously hot[1], will burn you[2], but after two days of moderate use, has not burst into flames or popped like a kernel of popcorn.

In totally related news, though, my powerbook 17″ (gen 2)’s hard drive has eaten it while migrating data to the new machine (while performing a backup to a network share on my g5, actually, but same diff). That’s another story, but perhaps the point being… what’s going to happen to MBP17 when I actually start running the drive and processor at full power, as opposed to having it sit idle?

Looks like we’ll find out, as soon as I can find a clear way to map disk io, cpu activity and temp on one matrix. CHECK-1!

And finally, as a side-note, I don’t think I’ll be closing the lid on this one, letting her go to “sleep”, then throwing her in the laptop bag. As absurd as this sounds, I think I’ll be shutting this one down before putting it in enclosed spaces. Just to be safe.

And, really finally, just as I’m about to hit “save” on this, the XP instance under Parallels just rebooted… of its own accord. Again, that’s another story. Stay tuned. hot!

[1] I realize this is non-quantified, since I don’t know what “too hot” means from a design spec or a practical failure perspective.
[2] Which in my book doesn’t really differentiate it much from the 17″ PB.

## update ##

Courtesy of Neil, a debate rages over on an Apple support forum as to whether resetting the PMU (power management unit) can have a hand in fixing too-hot MacBooks and MacBook Pros.

I’ve followed the procedure (because I’ll do anything for laffs). We’ll see what happens.

[image: laura domela; probably not safe for most work]

Tell them ‘Storm Large’ sent ‘ya

Week three of rock star: supernova. A singularly lackluster set of performances. Maybe I was just in a bad mood from having to wash dishes that had contained “taco soup”, a 50/50% soup/cheese concoction that requires a sandblaster to remove from fiesta-ware.

There were weeks like this last season with INXS, too — the doldrums. There are something like 13 participants left, and what’s depressing is that at least 8-10 of these people need to go before we got to something approximating a real contest. Seriously. Unless some C-players start bringing A-game.

Without anything specific to criticize below and beyond the widespread mediocrity of last night’s show, I’ll provide a quick run-through. This will be neither pretty, nor inspired:

Zayra — Kelley and I agree you didn’t have a bottom three song picked out last week, leading to the baffling move of doing the same song on wednesday that band railed you for the night before. That is such b.s., girl. I know that since you’re from… wherever you’re from… you look down on us Americans. I’d suggest moving to a 100% Stevie Nicks performance track. Stand back! I need a little sympathy! But now you’re doing REM and the band says they like it. A lot of times I want to slap people when they say, “I’m confused”, because it’s really a passive-agressive way of saying “you’re not expressing yourself sufficiently well”, but I’m so confused.

Jenny — aka Aimee Mann, except not rock. You are so not rock. This doesn’t mean you’re a bad musician or performer, but you are anti-Tommy Lee, in the anti-matter is anti-matter sense. Now you’re doing Stone Temple Pilots. You rock about 1/12th as hard as Alanis Morissette. You’re going out. I swear to you. You’re going down. Tonight.

Storm — The best-looking female on the show by far. And my gaydar is screaming. The forecast is in: a storm’s coming and it’s gonna be: h-o-t. Cool it down, you got to cool it now… ooooh — watch out!, you’re gonna lose control! Oh, those links are probably nsfw.

Ryan — You’re constipated, dude.

That Australian Guy — Where were you last season?

Phil — You’re not rock, Phil, but a ray of light was shed last night when you stepped up to do White Rabbit. The only problem is (as any H.S.Thompson fan knows) this song is all about when it peaks, and little else. You built, you built, Newstead (coked up?) was with you. You were there, forming it, playing with it, the radio was about to be thrown in the bath tub… and you failed to peak with the song. You blew it. Pfffrrrrtt. Stop delaying the inevitable and turn in your torch. But then again, you have a lot of tattoos. Who are you, Phil?

Patrice — You are a Sheryl Crow wannabe leatherwoman.

Dana — You’re cute, there’s nothing wrong with your body and 80% of your quasi-fetus moon child face. You are just not rock, though; you look so uncomfortable up there. And you wouldn’t last twenty minutes in the clutches of Tommy Lee. This is a guy who, on a bet, went over a month without bathing — according to his own auto-biography, which was co-written with his phallus. This is not for you, not for you…

Magni — You need to start doing Judas Priest songs exclusively, dude. Only then will your true potential be unlocked, like when Neo gets killed at the end of the first Matrix and realizes it’s all not real.

Lukas — I (once again) voted for you (five times) last night, but at the week three mark it’s pretty clear that we’re not seeing Lukas, per se, but the Lukas-Rock-Persona that is the only form Lukas can take. It would be nice to see under the veil, but I so know you’re a ringwraith.

Josh — Kelley’s right: you sound like Tracy Chapman, dude. I was drivin’, drivin’ in your car. You jumped out of the car and got out of the car. Eject.

Jill — Mrs. Tommy Lee #4 (5?) Penthouse… .com.

Dilana — You, along with Lukas, are the only two people who are actually in competition here. The funny thing is that when you’re not making terrifying faces, and you let your face relax, is how cute you are. But you have way too much s**t in your face.

Finally, Dave and Tommy have lost their minds (thanks Neil for the link), which is what I expect from Tommy… but somehow I continue to expect more from Dave. Again, I think it all goes back to “mountain song”: coming down the mountain! DA-DA-DUH-DAH-DAH-DUH-DA-DAH-DUH-DUH-DAH-DAH!

Better luck next week. Let’s hope, at a minimum, more than one player goes home tonight. Sorry, guys.

[1] I write this while watching Wednesday night’s elimination show.

So, the MacBook Pro 17″ hardware gen 1 arrived today. Although it has already been used long enough for an I.T. Guy[0] to install OS and a few apps, there are no visible signs of heat-related warping, charring or exploding… yet.

I think this is probably the 1,024th web site to do the “oooh, look at my new MacBook!” thing…

Things… seem to be in order. No visible warping. Nothing on fire.

Note the absence of a charred stump at the wrist on my left arm…

Note the same on my right arm. Some bloating, but not related to MBP heat issues.

Things seem squared away. This laptop will never be this clean again, so it’s another good reason I took this picture: memories.

So, at the end of phase one, I can state:
1. The MacBook Pro was not on fire when it arrived.
2. There was no visible heat-related warping when it arrived.
3. I had more or less two functioning hands when it arrived.

We will stick with this story as long as we have to.

tbc.

[0] The CIO of my company, actually, who is a huge nerd and a Mac weenie in addition to CIO.

I’ve owned a number of first-generation Apple products in 21 years, and plan to own many more in years to come. that’s how i roll. in other words, i am extremely reckless and stupid when it comes to that sort of thing.

Assuming the MacBook Pro 17″ currently en route to my home office doesn’t burst, spray battery acid or otherwise cause third degree burns and a charred nub where my credit card-swiping hand was. For certainly the negative experience would likely not drive me away from Apple, but rather drive me towards learning to live a life devoid of thumbs.

A short list of charges:

Mac IIsi c1991 This Mac sort of just sucked. It was underpowered for its time, the internal audio was constantly failing, and was a pain to take apart, which fortunately I rarely had to do since there were few upgrade options other than RAM. It never failed completely, just failed to impress. But notably it did not throw off enough heat to blind / scorch / cook / vaporize anything. Then again, it was not on my lap while in use.

Why this Mac a “gen 1″, you ask? It was the first Mac in a sort of quasi-pizza box chassis that was neither the fx,cx/ci full-height monitorless workstation, nor the true pizzabox style of the Centrix 610 / PowerMac 6100. I think the LC (which was even crappier) was the only other model to share the form factor. I am a huge nerd.

Titanium Powerbook 15″ - c 2001 till future (on hiatus) You could hold it firmly like you’d hold a cafeteria tray, one hand on each horizontal side, and sort of twist[1] just a bit. And that was an uncomfortable feeling, followed by the other heavier, hurt-ier feeling of the battery pack dropping out the bottom of the unit like the Marine drop ship in Aliens. 24 missions, simulated. 2 combat drops, including this one. And landing on your foot. No spraying battery acid, though… at least not for me.

One night I was drunk at my friend’s house, and I opened up the TiBook shell way too quickly, instantly decapitating the monitor from its way too-weak latches back to the main body. I screamed for about a half hour straight the same way b.spears might had she just performed the same action on her child, and then I stayed medicated for a week as said friend, who was not in a state of constant panic, packaged the pieces up and sent them to some Mac experts in Cali to perform emergency surgery. I think I paid each party (friend Mike, and MacExperts) $500 for this activity.

She (Stella was, and is, her name; she was a diver but she was never down) came back from that journey (thank you brother Mike), but she just wasn’t the same. I had to treat her really gently, which meant I could no longer use the open laptop as a foot rest when sitting on a couch. When I configured the screen at certain angles, video would drop out, then I’d tweak the screen back and things were fine, but my mind’s eye was quite clear on the fact that some video signal/power cable was slowly being sawed off inside the connecting hinge. I could see the shoddy job the “experts” out west did with regards to tucking in and covering Stella’s wiry, braided lady business between the main CPU and the screen. I didn’t have the heart to tell her she’d be blind soon, so I didn’t. I just tool her into my bedroom, hooked her VGA port up to a relic (but perfectly-working) Apple Sony 21″ Flat Screen Tube. A new lease on visual life. She had a gig of RAM, she had Airport, she had 100Base-T to file servers, and she had a big brother external color screen and a willingness to fight and live. And she did not feel shame when I relegated her to bedroom media access center. I didn’t have to tell her it was mostly going to be about displaying p0rn, and she never complained. When I switched her off at night, the monitor and the tibook module went dark, and she was beautiful when she dreamed. Eventually the laptop’s screen (post-decapitation/re-union of screen and keyboard) blinked out a second time, and Stella knew she’d be running permanently through external video means from here on in. Maybe she considered it sort of like being on dialysis. Maybe more like having a colostomy bag. She didn’t complain. Then again, she was “it”, and it was a laptop. I hear the new ones are complaining, though.

For the last eight or so months I lived at that place, Stella was carefully packed up and tucked into my sock drawer level of the closet to rest. if the machine was going to participate in a miracle and start regrowing leads and synapses from motherboard to monitor, I could think of no richer, more maternal environment than to be surrounded by my sometimes sorted, always filthy, “white” gym socks that I wore with everything (formal, informal, sandals), for that was my impetuous personal style at the time.

When I moved out of that place last October, I was faced with a decision to make about Stella and her head-problem v. prolongued usefullness in another role, among a few other tech-will-she-stay-or-will-she-go issues. Stella, dead screen still attached, was light, and she didn’t take up much space. And she was strong, at 1GB RAM and 500GHz G4 processor. She could do …stuff… like search for aliens. And I watched The Deer Hunter (bittorrented) for the first time through her (driving the aforementioned 21″ outboard monitor). We weren’t giving up on the old girl — she’d come with us, be backed in a box between some summer clothing and comforters and stuff, kept soft and cozy and in a sort of suspended animation until we can do something about it… in the future, when Apple releases a product called iDoctor which is a robot that first kills all employees at the Genius Bar and then fixes, using nano-technology, your old computer… old Apple computer. So you can keep them with you, like your children. I wish Apple would hurry up. Meantime, Stella is packed in towels, in a box, in an attic. Far away. A sleeping giant.

In summary, some people probably think that drunkenly decapitating a laptop is not an Apple engineering problem per se, but they’d be wrong: it was a design flaw. Those hinges should have been the strongest part of the system, but they were the weakest[5]. Also, the thing was hotter than hell.

My blue and white G3 - 1998-2005 rip , Bucky (named for Buckminster Fuller), did not receive such a honored fate; I gutted the PCI cards (”What am I going to do with a SCSI card? We’ll address it later.”) and RAM, took an ice pick to the hard drives, and eased down the ramp into the dumpster, and had to goad two nagging guilt-driven realizations into getting close enough to each other to cancel out:

a) Bucky was too old / slow to do anything of modern worth. not to mention the jelly blue+white aesthetic was sort of so 1998. I guess it could have been a good target at a firing range (if packed with dynamite), but i don’t have the hardware and memberships/ready access to make that a practical approach.

b) to leave Bucky so gutted, but technically still usable, is like leaving a vampire on a ship at sea with no human crew, only rats to drink.[3] it was a disgrace. I loved the computer, and it got a lot done for me. I paid for it [2], it was paid for, and now this is happening: it’s on the edge of the dumpster/crusher sled, its sliding down, crash. the chassis is down there. i’m looking at the dumpster hole, and i can see the G3 chassis in there. i don’t believe it has any feelings about it’s fate, since the box doesn’t have a loaded OS or… electricity or consciousness of a soul. That doesn’t stop me from, momentarily, wondering how dirty I’d get if I jumped in the hole to retrieve it, or what it would feel like if, during said process, the crushing claw came down like something from that “Layla” montage from Goodfellas and cut me and my former computer in half. No, I just walked away. And told myself that computer served its purpose, I got the data off it i needed, destroyed that which I couldn’t, and we were done, and that next time I should buy a cheaper and less pretty computer, perhaps, so the eventual emotional issues present at system disposal aren’t so gut wrenching. Except I can’t; I’m an Apple user. This process is just going to continue and I need to grow (or find) a pair and move on.

So, to pause, my 17″ MacBook Pro is coming soon, and this is a machine that will mean some new things, good things. It means my wife Kelley will get my 17″ PowerBook (G4), which has a history of not exploding, to replace the G3 chicklet I got her (used; from friend Eric) for Xmas three years ago. This will be an appreciated step up for her, and I will find myself in the cutting-edge world of wielding this first-gen platform that can not only the operating system I need to primary productivity (OS X; duh), but any number of others that could come in handy (Windows, Linux…, VMware stuff?) to take my productivity to the stately pleasure dome of uber-productive.

It should be here this week. Given the goings on with exploding batteries and warp factors, I think I’m going to have to stop taking the Tylenol PM, start taking pictures, crack out the thermometer, and add some fact and opinion to the canon of this story: will my new MacBook Pro heat to hot-hot then orange then white-hot, warp, jump to warp speed, split and spray me with battery acid[4], like the Alien queen in Aliens?

Uh, I hope not, because I actually have work to do, and I like my eyes. Stay tuned. We’ll take this one step at a time. I’ll be posting other stories of first-gen Apple woe along the way. tbc.

[1] I’m not saying i’m doing this…
[2] I had probably just finished paying the Apple loan a week or two earlier. HOOT!
[3] It would also be like when Ripley ran into the cyborg in Alien III in the junk yard, and he’s “alive” but all messed up, so he begs her to shut him down, as that would be preferable to just sort of sitting there forever, rusting. That is an android with honor. Bishop, was he?
[4] Note: To my knowledge so far, I don’t think any Apple laptops in the new lines have actually sprayed acid or exploded. They all seem to have gotten the memo leaving that to Dell. For now. But we also know, from experience, that when the machines choose to rise up, they tend to all do so at once.
[5] This assertion is completely non-qualified, but sounds good.