Axodys

My DSL connection seemed to be flaking out quite a bit earlier. Web pages wouldn’t load, or were quite slow to load if they did. Then I started pinging things and discovered I was getting like 60% packet loss. What’s up with that? Anyway things seem to have returned to normal now.

I’m starving, but Subway is supposed to be on the way. Guess I’d better take a shower before Mary gets home since we’ll probably be leaving again shortly.

The Seahawks were pathetic today, but the helmet to chin shot that knocked Trent Dilfer out in the second half really pissed me off. At least it drew flags and probably a fine for the aggressor later this week. Yesterday I saw a similar hit to an Oregon State receiver by a UCLA defender towards the end of that game that didn’t draw a single flag. I’m all for defenders making hard tackles, but both instances definitely fell under my interpretation of spearing. I’m kind of curious to see what the official rules in NCAA and college football are.

Football’s dirty tackle a dangerous game to play

I’m finally running MacOS X 10.1 (and it seems great so far), but it took me most of the morning to get to this point thanks to a few obstacles along my journey.

I arrived at my local CompUSA this morning cautiously hopeful that I would be able to get a hold of one of the coveted upgrade packages. Alas it was not to be. A surprisingly helpful employee let me know that they’d only received 16 copies and had given all those out to the several people that had been waiting in line prior to store opening. I asked him if they expected to get more any time soon and he said that they were, but I should check with their “Mac guy” because he knew what the exact details were.

I thanked the guy and headed over to a small group of people hovering around the “Mac guy” and a G4 tower. Did he have an image that I could burn to a cd? Yes in fact he did, but he was fiddling around with downloading and installing the Toast beta. Eventually he ran into a brick wall, but said we could copy the image file to cd if we wanted using the Disc Burner. Of course I did, but I had to go buy some blank CD-ROM’s first. 20 minutes and two CD-ROM’s later I was driving back home with .dmg file that I was going to have to figure out how to burn from within Toast.
When I arrived home I quickly attempted to mount the image file to verify that I had what I wanted. Thankfully it mounted up without any problems so my next move was to fire up Toast. Much to my dismay Beta 2 popped up with a dialog indicating it needed 10.1. The original Beta had started crashing on startup a week or two back so I wondered if rolling back my calendar might fix it. I jumped into the Date & Time System Preference and set the month to August. The original Beta launched, but now I couldn’t figure out how to burn the image as a bootable cd.
In the end after a couple disc burning missteps I found my answer over at MacFixit: “Using Terminal Jim Kateley suggests: ‘If you’re not command-line adverse and using Toast to burn, you don’t need Disk Copy at all. In 10.0.4, just convert the dmg file to a CD-R master using hdiutil: hdiutil convert -format UDTO -o ‘.”

This tip worked like a charm for me and within the span of hour I had a bootable install disc and an upgraded system. Now it’s time to do some further exploration.

Potential Mac OS X 10.1 Gotchas is an article on Stepwise with some useful tips for the unix friendly MacOS X user. Here’s hoping CompUSA will have the free update when I go there this morning.

I took a trip over to Barnes & Noble last night to peruse their computer book selection. I didn’t buy anything, but I saw several books that I’ll probably add to my collection sometime down the road here. It’s really nice to have not just one, but two B&N’s in town because without a doubt they provide the best computer book selection in Eastern Washington. While I like ordering things online as much as the next guy (probably more in fact) I like the instant gratification factor that a large bookstore provides.

I haven’t beaten Pillars of Garendall yet, but I’m fairly close. At some point a few days back I completely lost my urge to play. Part of that was related to the annoying sound loss/save game bug that I’ve been working around since the beginning, but the rest of it is wanting to get back to doing more productive things like the programming projects that I’ve had floating around in the back of my mind for months now.
Incidentally I’m hoping that the sound loss/save game bug will be fixed by MacOS X 10.1 which I have on order, but also hope to pick up tomorrow at my nearby CompUSSR.

Hey, today is my brother’s birthday. Happy Birthday Micah!

Kind of weird to think that he’s 24 years old now and that I’m up to 28.
I watched the series premiere of Enterprise last night and thought it was okay, but somewhat lame at times. I think there’s plenty of potential though and I like Scott Bakula so I’ll probably keep tuning in, but the fact that it’s going to be going head to head with Ed is definitely going to be a problem. And like a lot of people online have been talking about, hopefully they’ll drop the weak intro song.

The MCE FireBay is an interesting idea, but I can’t imagine there’s a whole lot of demand for such an item. I guess it will allow people that have already purchased expansion bay CDR/W’s for their PowerBooks to use them elsewhere, but for the price of the FireBay they can probably just get a faster external burner anyway.

Speaking of external drives I’m thinking about getting an external firewire drive sometime in the next couple months. I can’t wait to have enough drive space to do some serious video editing.

I’ve been seriously addicted to Ambrosia’s Pillars of Garendall RPG over the course of the last week. Luckily, after hours and hours of play I think I’m pretty close to being able to beat the game and getting back to general productivity. All the same it’s been a welcome escape from the hard reality the terrorist attacks have brought home to us over the last couple weeks.

Apple has a page revealing all the new MacOS X 10.1 features, but doesn’t have an obvious way to get a hold of it. If it’s only going to be available on CD it seems like they would have a place for you to preorder it. Maybe that means there will be some electronic options available.

Down and Out - How prominent sites performed following the terrorist attacks:

Broadband in the Boonies, Part II Bad news for Mac Starband users.

The Fink F.A.Q. I used Fink to get MacGimp up and running under MacOS X a while back, but I haven’t been keeping up with the latest updates like I probably should be. An impressive amount of progress has been made since I first started using it.

InformationWeek has a short article on the latest MS-spawned IT headache: Nimbda’s Biography. “This new breed of ‘malware’ (neither a virus nor a worm, but a blend of both) spreads similarly to Code Red in that once it infects a computer, that system begins scanning for new victims to infect. And, just like the ILOVEYOU virus, Nimda also spreads via E-mail. Nimda can also infect unprotected computers used to browse Web sites on infected servers.”

I was taking a sick day Tuesday when Nimda really started making the news, but luckily we only had a couple infections on campus and they were outside my building. When I came back in Wednesday I fully expected my Win2k test server to be infected, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.

Disconnect the Dots is a really interesting look at the new war paradigm that we’re dealing with in the wake of the WTC disaster. [via rc3.org]

I haven’t been writing much lately because like most people I’ve been fairly preoccupied with the events of the last week. As of today I’m feeling optimistic that this will be a much more productive week for me weblogging and otherwise. And best yet I get Friday off (Labor Day make-up vacation).