Personal

  • California Day 0: Great Food, Weather, Hotel…

    Yesterday my mom and I started our vacation in California. The trip here was very long, taking several hours flying from St. Louis to Orange County and finally to San Jose. But after staying here for only 1 night, all of that was definitely worth it.

    Valencia Street View

    First of all, the weather difference is night and day. Coming from Southern Illinois where high humidity is the norm, the climate here is great. We are staying at Hotel Valencia Santana Row, an upscale hotel which is jaw-dropping beautiful. We had dinner a block away at The Counter where you are given a clipboard and pencil to literally build your own burger (which tastes amazing). This morning I ate breakfast at Citrus which was just as good as everything else here.

    The Counter: B.Y.O.B.

    So far, the only negative has been finding a place to park, but what can you expect in California?

    Today, I’ll be taking a tour of Yahoo! with some of my friends who work there and then hopefully go see some of the other area attractions.

  • Phantom Vibration Syndrome

    Ever get the feeling that your cell phone is vibrating, but it really wasn’t? Hello, Phantom Vibration Syndrome.

  • My Problem With Facebook Platform

    Facebook Overflowing Requests
    I’m getting tons of these junk requests every day. I wish Facebook would provide a mechanism to “ignore future invitations” so I wouldn’t have 5 new iLike invitations whenever I login. (Besides, I already use Last.fm.) Otherwise, my requests page is becoming just as bad as my MySpace.

    Other than annoyances such as this, Facebook’s Platform is a great concept. I hope that Facebook further refines their Platform to accommodate for situations like this.

  • Hello MacBook

    I have spent a week with my brand new black MacBook now, and it is amazing.

    I set it up on Thursday while I was at work. It was extremely simple to set up. I had a external USB hard drive containing a backup of my Mac mini. I just plugged in the drive and the first-run setup assistant asked if I was transferring from another Mac. I selected the “transfer from another partition” and my USB drive came right up. An hour or so later, my user account, files, settings, desktop background… everything was back to normal.

    I also bought a DVI to Mini DVI adapter that works great with my external monitor. I now have 2 displays for my Mac… it has made me a lot more productive with everything. Definitely an improvement. Add the 3rd display from my Windows box, throw in Synergy and I have what could be the ultimate computer workstation.

    I take it to school a few times a week and carry it around all day. Although the MacBook was heavier than I thought it was initially, it really doesn’t feel very heavy in my backpack. This thing is very useful… it is so convenient to have everything with you all the time: being able to burn a DVD for someone on the spot, school files, music, movies, photos… all available instantly by waking the computer from sleep. It’s great.

    As far as usability, the keyboard is great, the key spacing isn’t as bad as I thought. The glossy display also is better than expected: the glare isn’t as bad as some pictures suggested. I have yet to run down the battery but I had 75% or so power remaining after spending an hour in Panera using WiFi last night. I typically keep it plugged in. The included power brick is worthy of praise all by itself: it’s square, with interchangeable “plugs” that allow for using a long cord or a flip-out plug for use on the go. Tangling up the wire never happens thanks to flip-out clips that you can wrap the cord around for easy storage in a bag.

    Finally, his thing looks gorgeous. I was initially concerned that the black case would not be as good as white, however, it is still distinctly Apple, gets attention, and after a week of use, is more durable that I expected. (Thanks to everyone at work who helped with the color choice!)

    So, these are some of my first impressions with my new notebook… and everything is good so far. I hope it stays that way!

  • Goodbye Mac mini…

    After 2 years of solid, reliable, trouble-free operation, my Mac mini suddenly experienced a hard drive failure.

    Yesterday around midnight I was busy working on a school project in Pages on my Mac mini G4. The songs I were playing were skipping like crazy and the computer gradually slowed to a crawling pace. I restarted the machine, but the computer appeared to be stuck at the grey boot screen.

    The Combo drive in my mini was half-working (a problem I couldn’t get Apple to fix under warranty over a year ago) but I was able to start from a Tiger CD (not DVD) and ran Disk Utility. Halfway through the repair, the computer froze. I restarted but this time it was really stuck. Booting in verbose mode exposed the nasty error IOATAController device blocking bus a few dozen times followed by a IO timeout on the hard drive, the journal replay failing, and the computer failing to mount the hard drive.

    About this time my Combo drive followed in my hard drive’s footsteps and refused to boot my Tiger and DiskWarrior CDs. I hooked up my LaCie FireWire CD drive and used OpenFirmware to clear my NVRAM and boot from FireWire. My DiskWarrior CD couldn’t even recognize my hard drive’s hardware and my Tiger CD failed to load its own kernel.

    In short, my mini was completely gone. I had a backup system in place and the only thing I lost was what I was working on that night. I’m thankful for that. Still, I need a computer. I would need to replace the Combo drive and the hard drive to fix the mini. However, I was intending to buy a MacBook later this year for college. After considering some of the annoyances the Rev. A mini gave me (flaky drives, including display artifacts when using DVI digital video, no Quartz Extreme) I decided that fixing the mini for about $200 wouldn’t be worth it considering I’d be migrating to a laptop in the near future anyway.

    So, I used my saved up money on a MacBook. I ordered the black one yesterday and can’t wait for it to arrive tomorrow. I wish that I could have waited until the next spec bump but I didn’t really expect my once-trusty Mac to just die. (In light of my experience, I bought 3 years of AppleCare and made sure with an Apple salesperson that I would not need to drive hundreds of miles to an Apple Store to get my computer fixed.) Here’s hoping that I won’t have any problems like this with my MacBook, because this thing is going to last me for the next 4 years.

    I’ll update when it arrives tomorrow.