So it’s been a week since I entered technological hell. Cashed my bad karma chips in. Wanted to get into gardening. Why?

Last Sunday my IBM Travelstar 48GB drive I had put into my PowerBook G4/500 died. It died a year ago and was replaced by IBM, but now it was dying again. It had failed to spin up twice in three days post sleep, so I knew it was not in good shape.

So Sunday it fails for a final time. I check out my backup LaCie 60GB firewire drive and oops, I have not backed up since October! Well, ok, I had all of my source online and other places. The source was encrypted, which then hit me, I never wrote down the key! I called DriveSavers and was quoted between $500 and $2700. Ouch.

So I let it set for a few hours and booted off my LaCie. Sure enough, the IBM was back alive! So I unmounted the LaCie and plugged the laptop into my G4 tower. I rebooted the powerbook in target disk mode and proceeded to use Apple’s Backup app to back up 28 GB to 7 DVD-Rs. This took over 8 hours.

I then started a Carbon Copy Clone to the LaCie (now that I had a backup) I woke up Monday around noon and the copy had failed due to lack of disk space. ugh. So I looked around and found a hidden Trash folder that the Finder didn’t see. The trash had 8GB of data in it so I did a rm -rf on the trash and re-did the carbon copy clone of the drive.

I called IBM and they put me over to Hitachi who had bought the IBM disk division. They sent me to the web site to get an RMA. I tried that, but it told me I already had an RMA. I tried to look up the RMA from the serial number, but it could not be found! Turns out this is the RMA from last year. It was now too late to call Hitachi, so that had to wait until Tuesday.

So I then proceed to wipe my 48GB of all f the data three times to ensure it is clean.

Now it is tuesday and I am running off the LaCie since it has all of my data, and I hear a clunking sound. Clunk, Clunk, Clunk and OS X locks up. Sigh. I reboot, fsck kicks in, clunk, clink. My backup drive was now dying!

So I think “Screw this” and head to Frys. They had some Western Digital Special Edition 80s on sale for $90 after rebate, so I picked up two of those. I put one into the LaCie enclosure (since LaCie said the drive is dead and not worth repairing) and proceeded to use .Mac backup on the G4 to restore from my DVD-Rs.

Well crap, the restore failed. It could not find file “0-0-0-0-1.html” then 2, then 3, etc, etc, etc. Ok fine, my laptop is running, I’ll manually copy the files off the DVD-Rs as backup keeps the files in clear text. I copy “My Applications” over to the drive and try to open my excel spreadsheet that has my passwords on it. OS X tells me it cannot find Excel. Well ok maybe the Finder is hosed.

I open My Applications, then Microsoft Office. No applications! I start checking and none, none of my applications were backed up by Backup! Only documents! How lame is this? Nothing in the read me, the help file, the Backup application states that it only backs up documents. I was really pissed at some engineer. Ya know, if I drag a folder into your backup app, back it up, or at least give me a dialog alerting me that not everything will be backed up!

Well this sucked. I own all of my apps, but I had a ton of installers I had made that now apparently existed nowhere. I let everything set for awhile, then put the Quantum 60gb (the dead one) inside of the G4 itself and it booted!

Happy I had miracle number two for the week, I carbon copy cloned the 60gb to the new WD 80 and finally had a full backup. I then put the second 80 inside the G4 and backed up the 60gb a second time. Now I had two backups.

Once that was done, I put the original 20gb back into the powerbook and got it updated from 10.1.4 to 10.2.4. I then copied my apps and important documents to the laptop.

Now that Simeon has found iBeeZe for me that lets me tell my G4 to wake up at 3am, I am going to get my Onstream tapes back into rotation. If Dantz will support my Pioneer A-105 I’ll make a DVD-R backup as well. I think a firesafe is in order.

And for the files I have stored remotely, the password is now hard to guess but rememberable.

It just goes to show, you can’t ever have enough backups.

Germans ban Command and Conquer

So they ban a game about war for glorifying war because it has no diplomatic solution. Well let’s ban Quake too! Oh and Pac Man, sure don’t see the ghosts and the infamous dot sitting down at the ole’ fruit table to debate things out.

Asteroids is gone, those little UFOs don’t have a chance.

Tetris is safe I suppose, but not multiple player. You’d have to decide how to make sure the game was a tie first.

Shoot, there are sick people in the world - You can’t help that. The rest of us don’t see a game about war as a fantasy of killing people! It is competition and nothing else.

Better start banning books about war too guys. Someone might see those horrific pictures as glorification (because men never read the articles)

Boing Boing reports onthis fab new case mod

Armani anyone?

Macromedia has redone their entire site in Flash. It works, despite reports, in Safari, but you can no longer tell what is clickable (everything shows a hand, since it is a plugin!), you can’t select/copy text and I am sure this is not very accessible aware, since everything is a graphic!

Yuckola.

On Everquest I play a character named Furyan. I have started a weblog so friends can follow along my adventures and also have a place where I can scribe information I find as I play.

You too can read the scroll at:

Furyan’s Tales of Adventure

As some of you know I have been really busy of late. Besides dating a wonderful person, I have been finishing up the port of TK3 to OS X (yes, amazing, eh?) and am just now getting printing working, then tackling performance.

On top of that I have been playing Everquest a bit again and am close to level 57. My horse is only 2+ levels and 19 AA points away!

It has been raining a lot this week in Portland with Mt. Hood receiving a ton of snow. This weekend I get a half load of bark dust so I’ll be getting a little exercise shoveling that around the garden.

I was not able to do my iPhoto presentation last month because I picked up the Canadian flu (hey, it was 50% easier for me to get up there with the exchange and all) so I will be doing that at the end of this month. I’m also teaching an iPhoto 3 class next month at MacCamp.

I’m about to get my resum%eacute; on monster, and I have another project that sounds really interesting in the works. Time to get back working where I am paid.

So that has been about it! Still kicking, will be posting more, stay tuned!

McDonalds will begin offering one hour of wifi access with your combination meal. Sweet, now I can eat a bunch of junk food and spend an hour sitting on my butt letting it settle in. Oh, wait, I do that at home already, sweet!

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Only one Mac, and it had to be specially ordered, but is used because the PC was just not fast nor stable enough when lives are at stake.

Talk about an advertisement!

Wired story here

Apple released a security update which fixes a flaw in Sendmail (which is off by default) and includes a more robust version of OpenSSH.

You can get the update from Software Update.

The Security Update addresses a security issue in sendmail where a remote individual could gain access and control of the system. Although sendmail is off by default in Mac OS, it is recommended that all users install this Security Update. This update also includes a newer version of OpenSSL that provides improved data confidentiality by addressing a recently-discovered security issue.