Okay, my previous post about my Time Machine experience was premature. Though I was able to install what seemed like a stable system from one of my Time Machine backups, rebooting is still a problem. I can sometimes boot into Safe Mode, but a regular boot is out of the question. I attempted to create a new Time Machine backup (of the restored system, to an old USB2 hard drive that I hadn’t been using for anything) and it crawled to a halt. So something is deeply wrong, either with the internal hard drive itself, or with the buses. I’ll be on the phone with Apple today. We’ll see what happens.

Since I’m up, at least in safe mode, I’d like to copy my iPhoto Library to something. It’s about 45GB, which rules out burning to DVD or uploading over the web. I think I’ll pick up a new drive today and copy it to that, just for safe keeping. All this hard drive instability makes me nervous as hell.

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My internal hard drive took a dive Friday. Things got slow, I had to power down, and then OS X wouldn’t boot. Between then and now, I’ve learned a lot about OS X and Time Machine. And the whole process just underscores a well-known computing joke: “There are two types of drives; those that have crashed, and those that will.”

Time Machine, the automated backup software that is included with OS X, is pretty cool. But I found myself in a bind, because the last Time Machine backup I had to work with was from noon on a day when I worked until five.[1] So there was a very big gap of time in which I had been highly productive (on a Friday, even! Take note, current and future employers!). Naturally, I wanted to nab those files before I started any sort of restoration process.[2]

As usual, AskMe came to my rescue. I posted a question and someone there turned me onto the ditto command and to how OS X specifies the location of drives. I was able to boot from the OS X installation DVD, fire up a terminal, and copy the files I had created to a USB jump drive. Then I reinstalled OS X. When the installation finished (and it took quite a long time), it asked me if I wanted to start fresh or start with a Time Machine backup. I went with the Time Machine backup, and the migration assistant started on its journey. It was late, so I let it run overnight.

When I woke up the next morning, the file transfer dialog’s status bar was almost all the way across. A status message told me it was “Transferring files to support applications” and that it had about three minutes left. Good enough, I thought, and went about my day. I kept checking on it, but it never changed. I was reluctant to coldcock[3] the machine, as I suspect one too many improper shutdowns (i.e. Haden + power strip + pretty light on power strip) had been the cause of the hard drive issues in the first place.[4] So, I let it run until about eight o’clock that evening.

Some web research convinced me that my machine had zombied out, and that I might have better luck booting from the DVD and restoring from Time Machine via its utilities menu, instead of via the migration assistant.[5] Alas, the first stab at that (which took several hours to run) failed to produce a bootable system. (I, again, found myself staring at the grey screen of death.) So, I tried it again, this time rolling back to the penultimate Time Machine backup. Luckily, that one took. And, though I composed this on my backup machine, I’m happy to be posting it from my beloved iMac.

Notes

1. I have no clue why Time Machine stopped backing up. I suspect that the internal hard drive issue was to blame–that it was trying to back up something incurably broken.
2. I booted from the OS X installation DVD and ran Disc Utility, which fixed some errors with my hard drive, but I still couldn’t boot.
3. I don’t know why all of my metaphors for computing are violent. My favorite phrase for using very powerful and complicated software for a simple task is that it is “too much gun for the job.”
4. Note to self: buy an uninterruptible power supply.
5. It should go without saying that, at many stages in this process, I was feverishly researching all manner of solutions, using both my iPod touch and my wife’s ancient Dell laptop (Inspiron 5100, 2.40GHz Pentium 4, 384MB RAM) that we haven’t used in months because, after having become accustomed to the iMac, it feels about as modern as one of those newfangled electronic calculators we had as kids with the LED display.

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Infinite Summer has wrapped up, and I am still reading Infinite Jest. In fact, I’m only about halfway through (currently on page 550, by rough estimate [1]). But I’m still counting it as a victory, because Infinite Jest had been on my list for a long time, and I’m now too far in to back out. It’ll take a while to finish it up, but my first experiment with an internet-based reading project has been a very positive experience. I’ve met some cool people, learned a lot about DFW, and made my way half-way through a crazy, thought-provoking novel.

I’ll blog more observations about the novel as I make my way through it, though I’m more concerned, now, with simply reading it.

Meanwhile, Infinite Summer has launched a follow-up reading project focusing on Bram Stoker’s Dracula.  Coincidentally, I have been reading that novel along with Infinite Jest. It is one of the novels that comes with Classics app, and I found myself reading when I didn’t have my copy of Infinite Jest around, both because I like vampire stories (in film, at least) and because I’d never read it before and felt a little guilty about it. So I could jump on that bandwagon, but I’ll probably just eschew the deadlines and continue to read them both at my own pace. Dracula is light fare compared to Infinite Jest, and can be a nice respite from it, at least when Stoker’s occasionally ham-fisted prose and tin ear for dialect doesn’t get in the way of his storytelling.

Being as I’m still in the thick of it, I can’t offer a resounding pronouncement on the novel itself. All I can say is that I continue to enjoy it. And I’ve enjoyed chatting with you about it.

Notes:

1. I found lugging the book around was an impediment to my actually reading it, so I bought the Kindle version for my iPod touch. The Kindle app doesn’t give you page numbers, it gives you a “location” value which is, for reasons I still can’t determine, expressed as a range (I am, currently, at “Location 12515-12523″). Triangulating with the paper copy, I found that multiplying that first number by 0.044 makes for a pretty accurate estimate of the page number in my paperback copy.

[This post was dual-published at Infinite Zombies and at wheatblog.com.]

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Overheard recently in a department store, while Gina, Haden, and I were shopping for some children’s clothes. A woman, 40-something, and her son, maybe 10 or 11, discuss sizes with a sales clerk:

Clerk: We have those, but only in a “Husky.”
Woman: [Emphatically] Oh, no, no. He’s anorexic skinny–concentration camp skinny.
Son: ???
Woman: It’s okay: skinny is good.

How many things are wrong with this conversation? The flippant use of “anorexic”? The even more grievously flippant use of “concentration camp”? Or is it that maxim at the end (and its unspoken converse). For the record, the boy was of normal size–neither particularly skinny nor at all overweight for his age. The mother I would describe as verging on gaunt.

A note to the college bound: psychiatry is a growth industry, and ever will be.

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I first posted about making the switch to Mac a year ago today, so I thought some sort of followup post might be in order (and, you know, I was hurting for a blog idea, so here goes).

I’ve been pretty vocal about how much I like OS X and the suite of apps that ship with it. iPhoto, in particular, is a wonderful thing. It makes managing media incredibly easy, intuitive, and powerful. Now that I’m a parent, I generate a lot of photographs and short video of this kid. Wrangling these with Adobe Photoshop Elements, as I had done when I was on WinXP, was workable but slow, especially when it came to editing. Managing and editing them with iPhoto is cake. Even better, the “Faces” (i.e. face recognition) feature in iPhoto ‘09 saves me the trouble of tagging things, I just let Faces work its magic and then go through every once in a while to weed out the false positives.

The most obvious difference between OS X and WinXP is the subdued color palette of OS X–mostly shades of grey–that makes it very easy on the eyes. After working on my iMac for a while, WinXP (and, even worse, Vista) seems gaudy. You can tame most of those excesses, of course. But, out of the box, it’s way too flashy. With OS X, the only thing I had to change was the desktop image.

The three-dimensional vibe of the Dock is nice; I feel like I’m looking into a window rather than at a flat wall (the designers had even more fun with that depth metaphor in Time Machine). Though OS X is visually understated, it isn’t lacking in sophistication. The dock icons are reflected in the semi-translucent surface of the Dock. Dragging an app near creates quite beautifully realistic reflections between the two. It’s eye candy, but it’s classy eye candy. Beyond the looks and it’s utility as an app launcher (though I tend to use Spotlight for that), the dock is handy in that it tells you at a glance which apps are running. Many apps use it to provide notifications (the icon for Mail is telling me right now that I have three new messages).

On the geek side, having a bash terminal is a wonderful thing. I learned my way around the Unix command line back in the early days of the web, when my university email and web hosting accounts were on a SunOS box to which I only had telnet access. On every WinXP box that I use regularly, I run Cygwin, as DOS makes my head and eyes hurt. But, on OS X, bash support is  native, thanks to the BSD-based engine that undergirds everything.

PDF integration is amazingly handy. I don’t print receipts anymore. I just save them as PDF to my web receipts folder–a feature that is native on the print dialog and is compatible with every application that implements printing. It’s also great as a workaround for apps that don’t export to a format I like.

It’s rock solid; I think I’ve managed to crash it twice in the past year. I had two power outages lead to startup difficulties, both of which were solved with a second power cycle. (The grid here is incredibly weak.) If it weren’t for Haden’s obsession with the power strip, I’d almost never need to restart it.

As a software trainer, one of my favorite features is the help menu, which searches through the menu items themselves, before hitting the help docs. When you choose from the available matches, the appropriate menu opens and a nice blue indicator appears next to the menu command. It’s saves me lots of time, especially when I’m using an app that I don’t use often. It’s so effective, I often don’t bother learning the menus: I just rely on the search. Instead of starting you off on a goose chase through the documentation or, worse yet, some web-based version of the same, the help menu keeps you focused on the application and helps you become familiar with it. It’s incredibly clever: a simple idea, brilliantly executed.

Of course, there are annoyances, too, but I’ll save those for another post.

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