The Blog-Files

Mezmerized

I heard the track "B.Y.O.B." by System of a Down on the radio a couple of weeks ago and was intrigued. The chorus was very catchy but the rest of the song was, how to put this...odd. The vocals were reminiscent of Eastern European heavy metal. I took a chance and purchased the entire album off the iTunes Music Store. It was called Mezmerize by System of a Down.

I got a very pleasant surprise. I haven't heard an album this good since "American Idiot" by Green Day. Politically motivated to be sure but this is no "Pop/Punk" Green Day album. It's a bit more hardcore than that.

Before I go any further I have to mention that my musical taste is quite diverse. If you saw my music library you would swear that I was schizophrenic. Many people will not like the style of music this band plays. It is at times VERY VERY aggressive, so don't go buying this album unless you think you're up to it. I, however, found System of a Down's sound amazingly refreshing. They are a truly unique band. Musically gifted, incredibly creative, with a sound that is tight and clean. Rick Rubin has produced many a great album and this ranks up there with his best.

What else can I say? I like it.

*****

A Sad Day...

I'm sorry to announce that my first iMac, a 450MHz Ruby DV+, died today. It was on it's way out to be sure but I can't help thinking that it was feeling neglected and just decided to give up the ghost rather than hang on to it's occasional usage. The CD-ROM drive ceased to function reliably over a year ago, so much so I had to boot it into target disk mode to install the last operating system I put on it, OS X 10.3 "Panther". The display was starting to fade on one side and, quite honestly, after viewing my new 20" iMac G5's display, it looked rather small and fuzzy.

I got my monies worth out of that computer. It spent most of it's entire lifespan powered up and working on something. It put in more that 11000 hours of Seti@Home time. That's 556 units for those familiar with the program.

I will be removing the RAM and hard disk and then take it somewhere for "recycling".

So we are now a one computer family again. It's weird. We used to have three. Now there is actually a queue to use the iMac G5. It's 10:20 PM and everyone else is asleep. So now I get my turn...

Nano Impressions

I received my iPod nano about 5 days ago and have had time now to reflect on the product after making it through the "Wow" phase. I didn't want to post anything while I was on the "new owner high" that comes with buying any well-hyped product.

I must admit that after purchasing the nano I was constantly reading reviews and news stories to reaffirm my decision. Anytime you unload $300 on something you want to feel like you made a good decision and didn't get ripped off. This happens a lot with car buyers. You become hyper-aware of your particular model of vehicle and how many (or few) of the same model of car is on the road. I guess it's only natural.

Anyway, the honeymoon is over so here is my no holds barred review of the new 4GB iPod nano.

The form factor can only be described as stunning. Apple has really out done themselves this time as the nano is the perfect blending of function and form. The screen, though smaller than its predecessor, is a high resolution colour display that actually shows one more line of text than the iPod mini. The interface it the same as the other iPods, which is, simple elegance, and pretty much what makes an iPod an iPod. If I had to find something to gripe about it would have to be that screen is virtually unviewable without the backlighting on, which means you're using more of the battery. However, I set the backlight to turn off when idle for 2 seconds, so it's really not an issue. If I had to find something else it would be that I haven't yet been able to easily tell where the click wheel is when it's in my pocket. I maxed out the volume once while trying to turn it off without looking and nearly jumped out of my shoes. I read somewhere that they went to great lengths to make the scroll wheel feel different that the rest of it, so maybe it will just take some time before my sense of touch is good enough to make the distinction.

Musically, I couldn't be happier with the nano. It sounds great. It has about 650 songs on it now with about 900MB free. I really like the new feature of iTunes 5 which allows you to add lyrics to your songs which you can then view while listening to the song. The only problem is that when you have the lyrics selected and stop moving the click wheel for 5 seconds or so the screen switches back to the "Now Playing" screen. If you return to the lyrics page you've got to start from the top and scroll down to where you were to continue reading along. In song's with guitar solo's or other interludes you have to continually jiggle the scroll wheel to keep the lyric page active, annoying by any stretch.

The ability to view photos on the nano is a cool feature that comes up a little short. The color screen is very nice and the pictures are quite clear but small. I must say that I'm a little disappointed that the photos aren't viewable on a television*, however, I think that whole photo thing was thrown in just "because we can". I think that the nano was designed to be first and foremost a music player, all the other things are a bonus. In fact, they were probably included to make the iPod and the iPod nano seem more like siblings than like cousins. The iPod shuffle is like some long lost second or third cousin that is only related through marriage and shares the same last (or in this case, first) name.

I have had a few weird things happen, however, like when I manually unmount the nano using iTunes and then remove it from the dock it won't turn off unless I first move the scroll wheel at least one menu item lower (or higher). I've also had it freeze up once after deleting a stopwatch timer. Neither one of these things is critical (except the freezing thing if you don't know how to reset the iPod) but they are cracks in the legendary Apple "attention to detail" which is why I'm a Mac user in the first place.

All in all it's a pretty sharp machine. I highly recommend it.

* I am quite curious what would happen if I was to plug the nano into an iPod photo dock that was connected to a TV. Although I think that the nano is software crippled in that department as well as hardware insufficient.

Back At It Again

I just got back from my first floor hockey game of the season. I feel pretty good now but I'm pretty sure I'm in for a world of hurt tomorrow. I purposely took it pretty easy, as in my old age I am now very aware of the importance of acknowledging my limits. I still found myself caught up in the game a couple of times and had a few shifts where I probably over exerted a little. However, I did manage to get a pretty good work out. A blister on my right hand late in the game opened up which was a little painful but a bit of hockey tape fixed it right up. Luckily, there's no game next week, so I've got 2 weeks to recover from any soreness that may occur.

For those who care, we lost by one goal.

Cool Tool for School!

I was tempted to buy an iPod shuffle when they first came out, but something stopped me. I'm glad I didn't. The more I thought about it the more I realized that the thing that makes an iPod an iPod is not the name. It's the functionality. I'll admit that I do use the 'Shuffle Songs' menu on the first generation iPod I've been using but I also really like the ability to search for a particular song that I want to hear.

So I had resigned myself to purchase an iPod mini at some point in the future. I didn't know how much longer the old iPod would function but I was willing to wait it out for a while. Maybe they'd drop the price or something. Or something, indeed!

The recently released iPod nano, which replaces the iPod mini in the lineup of music players offered by Apple, has all the functionality of an iPod with a form factor not that much bigger than a shuffle. This was truly what I was waiting for.

So did I buy one? You bet, I did. It should be here next week. I can't wait.

Crash!!

I'm just recovering. I'll be okay, it certainly could have been worse. I lost a little sleep and was quite stressed for several hours but everything is starting to settle back into it's old situation.

My new iMac G5 crashed. Crashed big time. I was in the middle of doing something with iDVD when I got the spinning colour wheel. It spread to other applications and the Finder. I couldn't force quit, nothing. I watched it for a while, hoping with all hope that it would come back to life but, alas, no. It was not to be. This has happened before. A little too frequently recently, causing my wife to question me about the possibility of a virus or something attacking my beloved iMac. No, that's just not possible, I said. Anyway, when faced with this problem before I've simply just restarted and kept on going on my merry way. Not this time.

After a hard restart. I got the normal start up screen with the grey Apple logo. The circle dial spun for what seemed like an eternity, then the screen turned blue and the circle spun for what WAS an eternity. I tried a couple more restarts to no avail. Now I was getting a little concerned so I quickly hopped on my other computer and hit the Apple Support site, as I find the Discussions section usually quite helpful. However, due to system maintenance searching was somewhat disabled, so I had to scroll through pages of posts looking for something similar to my problem. After a while of this I tried some of the standard support FAQs and tips. I tried them all, including starting up into "Single User Mode" and resetting the PRAM. Each time I restarted with the hope that Apple Support would bail me out. Nope.

Ah ha! A brainstorm. When I first got the iMac I had an issue with...I can't remember what it was now...but I used the online chat with a support agent thing and my problem was solved! I'll try that again. I click on the appropriate link and enter my Apple ID and...oh oh... they want the serial number. Okay, back to the iMac. If you don't know, the serial number is located on the bottom on the brushed aluminum stand that the computer is mounted on. So I carefully inverted my computer and attempted to read the serial number. The serial number is printed in quite small printing, in white on a grey background. I don't know if it was because I was staring at a computer monitor for so long or what but I could not, no matter how hard I tried, focus on the printing. As my arms were tiring I finally managed to hold the numbers at just the right distance to allow me to get a pretty good idea at what they were. I jotted them down and headed back to the other computer to try chatting with an agent. After filling in the online form I click on the "Chat with agent" button only to be told that I wasn't able to use that service since my 90 days had ended. If I really wanted to chat with a support agent I could buy an extended AppleCare warranty for upwards of $300 or pay a "per incident" fee of around $60. I opted for neither and went on to try something else.

I figured I could reinstall the system. That would be okay. No data loss. Archive and install I think they call it. So I got my install discs out and booted them up. I was quite shocked when I got to the part where they ask which hard disk you want to install the OS and there was only a picture of my external firewire drive! What happened to my hard drive? Huh? I found the Disk Utility in the menu of the Install disk and ran that. It said the Maxtor drive was there but the volume 'Macintosh HD' was all grayed out. I tried mounting the drive to no avail. I tried repairing the hard drive...error. This hard disk cannot be repaired, it said. My blood pressure was rising a little at this point and my brain was reeling. What do I do now? I was tempted to phone my brother who is quite knowledgeable in these matters and might know some magical UNIX command-line spell that would somehow tell the computer that I really do have a hard drive with OS X on it, but being that it was near midnight I figured I'd best just shut the computer off and leave it until the next day.

I didn't sleep well. I was running scenarios through my head. For you see, that same day I had visited my parents house and was working on my Dad's computer and his external firewire drive exhibited the exact same problem as my primary drive. Disk Utility could find the drive but not mount the volume and couldn't repair it either. Since it was only a backup drive I wasn't concerned with erasing it and starting again but did I really want to do that with mine? Would it work? Also, it being the Labour Day weekend and all, if the problem was hardware, the earliest I could take it in to be fixed would be Tuesday. Did I want to be without my beloved computer that long? When was my last backup? When did I backup my wife's account last? How much data could I potentially lose? These questions and more kept me awake for quite some time.

Skip ahead to Sunday and I hook up the External firewire drive to the working Mac just to see the status of my backups. Luckily, well not really luckily since I'm pretty diligent about backing up important stuff, my copy of ChronoSync had indeed backed up both accounts the previous night. So now I'm faced with a dilemma...do I try erase and start over or wait to take the computer to a professional?

Being that I wasn't even sure if the hard drive was working properly, I thought I should try to erase. If Disk Utility can't fix the volume maybe it can't erase it either and that, I figured, would indicate a hardware problem. So I bit the bullet and tried it. It worked! It worked! I LOST ALL MY DATA!! YEAH!!!

After about an hour to install the OS and run Software Update about 3 times to make sure everything was up-to-date I was ready to begin the task of returning all my data back to it proper place. Well, not just my data, but also my wife's and I had to recreate my son's account. All told, it took about 3 more hours. I'm actually still not done yet, however, it is now once again close to midnight so I'm going to sleep.

At least I'll sleep a little better tonight.