A long, cool video of Apple ads, SNL skits etc over the last 30 years.

Watch

So let’s review:

1. Tree falls into the house
2. Move 4 doors down into smaller place in 4 days
3. Travel to NY and Canada with a flu
4. Have fever for 5 days
5. Printer stops printing, buy a new one
6. Kick power cord on UPS and blow a circuit, buy a new one
7. Try backing up main hard disk on G5, get tons of read errors, each one taking 7 minutes. Buy new hard disk and restore from backup.
8. Mom has car totaled in accident but is ok
9. Mom buys new car and has someone hit it in a parking lot one week later
10. Oh yeah, get work done

On the plus side, everyone I know is doing well, which I can’t really ask for more. I’ll be happy to see this month end!

So my printer, Canon i560 survived the tree and printed ok, then gave up the ghost yesterday. Am guessing some crap was inside the machine and got sucked into the print head. Went through a set of inks cleaning to no avail.

So rather than spend $50 for a new print head (+shipping) I bought a Canon i4200 from the Mac store. Is a nice printer, $139. But now I can’t use aftermarket inks, oh well. They have chips on the inks, LEDs on the inks, etc. It does print from a cassette or the normal tray, so is nice, can keep it closed up when not printing. I can load nice photo paper into the cassette and it will choose that when doing pictures, etc. I had to load new drivers from canonusa.com before the Mac would see the printer.

For the last week I’ve been kicking the UPS cord by accident which was plugged into the outlet under the PC. Last night was the last time, as it overloaded and blew out. Sigh. So $149 later I have a new one, same unit. I also bought a APC surge suppressor to plug into it, as several people said some surge suppressors can feed back into the UPS and blow them. APC said they’d honor the warranty with theirs, and this one, while $25, has 5 outlets + 3 large brick outlets on it, so that rocks. I’ve also plugged my heavy duty extension cord into another outlet and the UPS into that – No more kicking the damn plug.

What a month.

On the good news front, the car fits into the garage again. I am going down to Storables soon to see what kind of stackable crates they have, which should hold up better in the garage and let me put more into them. I recycled two bins full of books today. I have a total of 5 computers, two printers, two CRT monitors and the now dead UPS going to recycling center soon as I clear off the hard disks. That will make even more room!

The living room is taking shape. Much more cramped, no 5.1 speakers, but it will work for now.

Next up is the dining room – Then I can have guests over for a thank you dinner.

I ran my standard Vonage test today, rsyncing a large file up to my website while talking to Matt on the phone.

For the first time, with no Quality of Service turned on, I was able to talk clearly and upload a file at around 213KB/s!

Very, very nice.

I had Verizon fiber optic internet installed today. here are some tests. My download from my website was slower, it never got above 500K/s, whereas comcast would spike to 700K/s for awhile. I wonder if this is a pathing issue to the server. The speakeasy tests were all much better on FIOS, and no packet loss on the pings. Uploading is much faster on FIOS.

Update: John had me install Apple’s broadband tuner and it really sped things up.

curl 98mb download (in kBytes/sec)

Then I installed apple’s broadband tuner for FIOS (http://www.apple.com/support/downloads/broadbandtuner10.html)

speakeasy SF

speakeasy LA

speakeasy NY

Comcast pings:

PING www.apple.com.akadns.net (17.254.0.91): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 17.254.0.91: icmp_seq=0 ttl=243 time=75.236 ms
64 bytes from 17.254.0.91: icmp_seq=1 ttl=243 time=72.403 ms
64 bytes from 17.254.0.91: icmp_seq=2 ttl=243 time=73.560 ms
64 bytes from 17.254.0.91: icmp_seq=3 ttl=243 time=74.599 ms
64 bytes from 17.254.0.91: icmp_seq=4 ttl=243 time=75.249 ms
64 bytes from 17.254.0.91: icmp_seq=5 ttl=243 time=74.313 ms
64 bytes from 17.254.0.91: icmp_seq=6 ttl=243 time=74.393 ms
64 bytes from 17.254.0.91: icmp_seq=7 ttl=243 time=73.111 ms
64 bytes from 17.254.0.91: icmp_seq=8 ttl=243 time=73.917 ms
64 bytes from 17.254.0.91: icmp_seq=9 ttl=243 time=72.669 ms
^C
--- www.apple.com.akadns.net ping statistics ---
10 packets transmitted, 10 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 72.403/73.945/75.249/0.948 ms

PING www.boston.com (66.151.183.21): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 66.151.183.21: icmp_seq=0 ttl=237 time=105.866 ms
64 bytes from 66.151.183.21: icmp_seq=1 ttl=237 time=101.489 ms
64 bytes from 66.151.183.21: icmp_seq=2 ttl=237 time=104.582 ms
64 bytes from 66.151.183.21: icmp_seq=3 ttl=237 time=103.774 ms
64 bytes from 66.151.183.21: icmp_seq=4 ttl=237 time=104.647 ms
64 bytes from 66.151.183.21: icmp_seq=5 ttl=237 time=104.013 ms
64 bytes from 66.151.183.21: icmp_seq=6 ttl=237 time=104.001 ms
64 bytes from 66.151.183.21: icmp_seq=7 ttl=237 time=104.611 ms
64 bytes from 66.151.183.21: icmp_seq=8 ttl=237 time=105.010 ms
64 bytes from 66.151.183.21: icmp_seq=9 ttl=237 time=103.839 ms
^C
--- www.boston.com ping statistics ---
11 packets transmitted, 10 packets received, 9% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 101.489/104.183/105.866/1.081 ms

FIOS Pings

PING www.apple.com.akadns.net (17.254.0.91): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 17.254.0.91: icmp_seq=0 ttl=237 time=43.257 ms
64 bytes from 17.254.0.91: icmp_seq=1 ttl=237 time=42.798 ms
64 bytes from 17.254.0.91: icmp_seq=2 ttl=237 time=42.810 ms
64 bytes from 17.254.0.91: icmp_seq=3 ttl=237 time=42.870 ms
64 bytes from 17.254.0.91: icmp_seq=4 ttl=237 time=42.826 ms
64 bytes from 17.254.0.91: icmp_seq=5 ttl=237 time=42.832 ms
64 bytes from 17.254.0.91: icmp_seq=6 ttl=237 time=42.843 ms
64 bytes from 17.254.0.91: icmp_seq=7 ttl=237 time=45.389 ms
64 bytes from 17.254.0.91: icmp_seq=8 ttl=237 time=42.861 ms
64 bytes from 17.254.0.91: icmp_seq=9 ttl=237 time=42.872 ms
^C
--- www.apple.com.akadns.net ping statistics ---
10 packets transmitted, 10 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 42.798/43.136/45.389/0.762 ms

PING www.boston.com (66.151.183.21): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 66.151.183.21: icmp_seq=0 ttl=241 time=111.116 ms
64 bytes from 66.151.183.21: icmp_seq=1 ttl=241 time=108.561 ms
64 bytes from 66.151.183.21: icmp_seq=2 ttl=241 time=111.037 ms
64 bytes from 66.151.183.21: icmp_seq=3 ttl=241 time=108.566 ms
64 bytes from 66.151.183.21: icmp_seq=4 ttl=241 time=111.058 ms
64 bytes from 66.151.183.21: icmp_seq=5 ttl=241 time=111.053 ms
64 bytes from 66.151.183.21: icmp_seq=6 ttl=241 time=108.589 ms
64 bytes from 66.151.183.21: icmp_seq=7 ttl=241 time=111.076 ms
64 bytes from 66.151.183.21: icmp_seq=8 ttl=241 time=111.081 ms
64 bytes from 66.151.183.21: icmp_seq=9 ttl=241 time=111.079 ms
64 bytes from 66.151.183.21: icmp_seq=10 ttl=241 time=111.077 ms
64 bytes from 66.151.183.21: icmp_seq=11 ttl=241 time=108.609 ms
64 bytes from 66.151.183.21: icmp_seq=12 ttl=241 time=111.088 ms
64 bytes from 66.151.183.21: icmp_seq=13 ttl=241 time=108.632 ms
^C
--- www.boston.com ping statistics ---
14 packets transmitted, 14 packets received, 0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 108.561/110.187/111.116/1.190 ms

http://nitro.ucsc.edu/

FIOS

10s outbound test (client to server) . . . . . 1.87Mb/s
running 10s inbound test (server to client) . . . . . . 9.96Mb/s

Lookie!

I went to my cabinet, still sick to find soup in a cups stocked up. No idea when you did this, but thank you

She really is special to me!

At least 15 pines and firs are being felled this week. I guess the owners got the message.

I’ll have pics up later, when I am not so feverish. Is pretty cool watching these guys work though.

By the way, if you come home and have white ribbon around your trees, that means they are bad but they don’t want to freak you out with red ribbon

Four are going from this new property alone.

I missed Lucien’s birthday.

What a nice guy. Always enjoy your company and running into you at Mac events or even the cheesecake factory

Happy Birthday!

A tree fell into the house, Apple ships Intel Macintoshes and iLife 06 and Steve takes a trip abroad.

Listen

iTunes rocks for podcasts but I had my settings set up to delete podcasts after I had listened to them.

This was fine, except for some podcasts, like Tikibar TV, I wanted to keep them all, even if I had listened to them.

When now in iTunes 6.0.2 you can control-click on a podcast and select “Do no auto delete”

Sweet!

Gotta love Apple. 24 hours after she ditched MSN for .mac and iLife’06 (Yes she has it and I don’t, I’m in Canada!) she has already made her first podcast, with images, thanks to GarageBand and .Mac.

Check it out

this is pure genius. A recut of the recent Microsoft Vista demo, showing all of their “new” features, but using Mac OS X video that we’ve had for 8+ months.

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3

All moved in!

Thanks to Julie and Sandy, we’re all moved in to the new place. It is definitely smaller, sigh, but will have to do for now.

The movers took 4 hours to move most of my stuff (not counting what we did on New Years) and then with Julie’s truck, we packed up the remaining bathrooms, empty boxes and smaller stuff in 3 loads.

It was a long, exhausting day. Now I am off to NY for business!

Well it has been a crazy week as you all know. Here is where things stand:

1. I’ve been working on Sophie at nights, as I have a demo this weekend to produce
2. The move happens tomorrow. The landlord’s insurance is going to pay for it!
3. I have taken over BetterHTMLExport, a fantastic iPhoto plugin originally developed by DroolingCat
4. Friday is finish the demo day.
5. I’ve gone out with a realtor twice looking for a house to buy. Nothing serious yet, but have seen some aspects I like.

Thanks so much to everyone for their kind words and efforts during this week. It is most appreciated.

Thanks to Lucien who tivoed the news, we have video of the event!

Watch (35 megabytes)

Thanks to Lucien who tivoed the news, we have video of the event!

Watch

Well the G5 and Mac displays survived. I have not tested the PC yet. Due to the awesome packing skills of everyone I was able to find some receipts I had set out on the table. I synced the G5 to the laptop and will deal with the rental situation tomorrow.

Thank you everyone who have written. It is much appreciated!

Here are some pictures that Janet took of the tree. Thanks, Janet!

Pictures

After Sara’s friend Ruthie left around 9:30, Sara and I went to breakfast and then shopping. We came home to find some fire dept tape around my property.

A 40-50ft pine tree fell through the roof! It punched holes over my office/family room, the kitchen and the bedroom.

I can’t say enough about Sara, Charles, Janet and the neighbors I did not know before who came and helped me move. The rental company came by and dropped off keys to a house 4 doors down so we were able to move the office and living room in 4 hours.

I want to thank them all (Jacob, Ashley, Michael, Brian and everyone I have forgotten the names of) for just jumping in and helping box and haul, or bringing dust masks due to all of the fiberglass that fell in.

One of the neighbors even offered a dish to eat! We were so busy tho I didn’t have a chance to take up her offer, but it was much appreciated!

Amazingly the roof fell onto the powerbook but the lid just opened all of the way and there seems to be no damage. A printer was knocked on the floor and my Radio Shark USB radio bit the dust.

Albert (The OS X stuffed tiger) was proudly holding up the roof to protect that end of the room.

Luckily it was not raining. Luckily we were not at home! Luckily a place was open 4 doors down from the same mgt company.

Of course, I broke my own rule and had my backup drive in the house. You can see if it was raining, or there was a fire, or the tree landed just a little left, I would have lost all of my data. Whew!

Interestingly enough, I have an appt in the am with a realtor. This should be interesting

Thanks again to everyone who helped out. We’re having a party when this is all done. What a way to get to know your neighbors!!

Pictures