by cg on October 31, 2007
One of our charming neighbors, dressed as a butterfly, was among the 47 ghosts and goblins who made their way to our door in this first, funny, GW Bush Halloween where darkness fell an hour later than usual. Last year, we had 53 come to our door.
It was a bit tricky to dig into last year’s halloween post to see how many visitors we had, mainly because it didn’t show up on any obvious search like ‘halloween’ (since fixed).
Clearly, we should think these things through, for posterity’s sake and make sure relevant search terms are in the text. In any case, we continued Linda’s dad’s tradition of counting the halloween crowd.
Anyway, John and Julie came over, we had dinner (Chef Gulker’s extremely low fat pork tenderloin with cabbage and apples) and enjoyed the proceedings at the front door. Many fewer younger goblins this year… I think the timing – it didn’t get dark until 7 – dinner hour – screwed things up…
by cg on October 31, 2007
Scott Loftesness sent me a note saying he’d had the same ‘blue screen’ experience as I with his Leopard install, but had cured it just by forcing a restart. Worked for me, too… now we’re exploring Leopard…
by cg on October 30, 2007
Here’s 2 of 3 pumpkins we’ll be putting out tomorrow night for the annual goblin parade. Still have to figure out No. 3…
by cg on October 30, 2007
This probably wasn’t Leopard’s fault (pun intended) but we felt about 30 seconds of rolling around 8:05 PM this evening. USGS makes it a 5.6 magnitude quake centered near Alum Rock, on the Calaveras fault. Seem to be more damage reports on the Peninsula than in the East Bay at the moment…
by cg on October 30, 2007
One hour, 30 minutes after we installed ‘available updates’ to our virgin Mac OS X 10.5Â Leopard install, we are still looking at Mr. Blue Screen with its spinning doohickey. Many online reports say if you just let it go, it will eventually resolve itself (I’ve seen this behavior with older versions of OS X), which is OK if you don’t mind losing the use of your machine for the better part of a day. Leopard itself booted right up – it’s the updates (which I think are meant to cure the Blue Screen problem) that caused this...
by cg on October 30, 2007
Our Leopard install started inauspiciously enough – Leopard couldn’t see our Mac Mini’s HD initially although it did see an external Maxtor USB drive that was attached to the Mini. We rebooted with the USB drive off, but still no dice. It took a trip into Drive Utility (which saw the drive, but not its volume) and a ‘Verify’ to get the Mini’s volume to show up.
A 21-minute DVD check followed, after which Leopard calculated a 2-hour install, later changing its mind to a 1-hour install. After an hour, Leopard got stuck on ‘Time Remaining: About a minute’ for about 15 minutes, causing a bit of anxiety, but Leopard eventually finished up in 1 hour, 9 minutes. The reboot paused for about 30 seconds at the blue screen (jeepers) before beginning to put my desktop up.
Almost immediately after the desktop appeared, Leopard informed me that updates were available (along with other messages asking me if I wanted to use the Maxtor with Time Machine, that there were Address Book conflicts with .Mac and a prompt to mount a server). I clicked ‘Install updates’, got a few progress messages and a reboot. I’m now back in the blue screen (with the spinner) where we’ve been for going on 5 minutes now. I think I’ll go do my stationary bike interval training and hope Mr. Blue Screen goes away in the meantime…Â
by cg on October 30, 2007
Leopard arrived late yesterday afternoon, in a tiny box not much larger than the DVD it contains. We’ve been alerted to the OS X ‘Blue Screen of Death‘ issue, so we think we’ll be trying out an ‘Archive and Install’ option on one of our Mac Minis before proceeding to other machines on the LAN.
The really hard choice will be how to handle the Dual G5 that is home to all of Linda’s (and my) personal files, bookmarks and email. One really should be able to just upgrade the machine, keeping personal data intact (user data is in directories separate from the system files), but we know from past experience, things don’t always work out that way – witness our iLife ‘08 disaster. Archive and install is a clean install and should just work…
by cg on October 29, 2007
Good article on WSJ.com on the current state of hybrids. On the one hand, they really do use less fuel and reduce your carbon footprint. On the other, payback times are long, given current US fuel prices (but better in Europe where fuel is heavily taxed). I love our Ford Escape Hybrid… it replaces a Land Rover that got half its 30 MPG…
by cg on October 29, 2007
“The pendulum in the Christian world has swung back to the moderate point of view. The real battle now is among evangelicals.†NYT story points out that evangelical congregations are tiring of politically-oriented pastors who preach right-wing Republican politics along with religion. There have been real-deal evangelical congregations all along who would not allow politics in the pulpit…
by cg on October 28, 2007
So, yesterday I was Bad Chris, and ate pancakes, with Linda out of town. I also feel like I’ve been Good Chris and caught up all my insurance paperwork – flex benefits, organized out-of-network claims for my ‘Integrative’ treatments and started on a monster form from the State (complete with 2 pages explaining the State’s paperwork ‘reduction’ act).
So, wth work done, I’ve spent a little time ‘noodling,’ digging around on gulker.com’s LAN, trying to fix a DNS problem, and otherwise doing geeky things. One of the pleasant surprises was discovering that our Canon MP530 all-in-one printer/scanner has a batch scan mode that works with our Mac. When we first set it up, the instructions said that the multiple-page scan feature was Windows only.
But, digging around in the Mac scanner client, I found a mode in the ‘MP Navigator’ software that referred to the Automatic Document Feeder. Sure enough, I dropped a 12-page document in the ADF, clicked ’scan’ and, Voila! – a 12 page PDF appeared. Yay. Given the number of forms I’m filling out lately, this will be a huge help. I can move all the disability docs into a paperless workflow…