Byrdhouse

Left On The Dial

Short of a fully-integrated connection to the car stereo, my favorite device for listening to my ipod while cruising is the iCarPlay from Monster. It produces a radio signal so you can tune in on any clear FM station. iCarPlay's strong signal keeps the static and interference at bay most of the time. That is, until this morning at a stoplight when my playlist was hijacked by Patsy Cline from the F-250 in the neighboring lane who, coincidentally, had the same FM device tuned to the exact same station.

I followed closely for five additional blocks just to hear "Walkin' After Midnight."

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Collecting the Art of Mr. Jeffreys

There's a folder on my laptop labeled "hiccups". It's reserved for those instances where images, for whatever reason, get corrupted, transformed, or otherwise digitally mangled without my intervention. Each time it occurs, I point to Mr. Jeffreys and smile with an bit of encouraging pride. Sometimes it's inspiring. At other times it's irritating, but overall I like the creativity. So much so, I take screen shots to capture each moment. Above is Mr Jeffreys' latest work. You can see the file whose icon was reworked on the bottom right. One day I hope to make a gallery show of it all.

Down and Out

The good news is Panther is now under the hood. Apparently I seem to be phasing out the early-adopter qualities of my younger self. Well at least for operating system updates. But it's here and it's zippy and, well, it's as great as people have been saying. It was a leap of sorts, and even when things went astray, I rested confident my projects, my photos, and all that great stuff were safe. See I've been burned on this sort of thing before, so this time around was all about being freakishly thorough. Although I believe weekends should not be spent scrubbing hard drives, there was something cleansing about the entire process- the back-up, the erase, the re-install. It is quite a refreshing experience.

Also, I'm currently being forced fed the South Beach diet.

Meanwhile on Mars...

Apple didn't release that line of housewares at the Macworld Expo yesterday as I was predicting. No duvet covers, no pillow shams, and no 300 thread count bed linens. I am now beginning to wonder if they ever will.

Nasa was on point with their delivery though. I'm as giddy as a science teacher about the first color image of Mars. Hell, I even printed it out and stuck it to my magnetic "inspiration" board. This is the first color image, right? It's funny how hollywood and reality can dance a little too close in one's memory.

Note to Nasa: Would you please do a better job on the image stitching (detail above).

UPDATE: See the panorama.

3112 Hours of Your Life

This is a story about a man backing up his data.

"So what you're saying is, if I format this drive FAT32 with a pc, I will be able to view data on it using both my pc and my mac?"
"That's right," nods the tech guru at the genius bar.

See, this isn't the first time I've run into this. A year ago I purchased a Maxtor external drive as a quick n' easy way to back up my projects, images, and general data. No server needed. Plug into the mac, plug into the pc, easy. Except HFS and FAT32 file systems, mac and pc respectively, have fundamental differences. They just don't see eye-to-eye on certain issues. Well namely, how to organize data. Two weeks ago, the Maxtor drive went kaput, data gone. 41MB of my business, life, and memorabilia, no more.

Maxtor tech support, "Yeah, you shouldn't have accessed it with both the pc and mac. It works for about three months or so, then the FAT32 and HFS get into this fist fight, right, and the loser is your data."
"You mean my digital life," my Apple branded self corrects.
"You should have backed up your data."
"Back up my back-up?"

A data recovery company kindly mined the lost data (and my pockets) for me. They got most of it back. Now they just needed something to put it on.

Here I was, at the Apple store, talking to a genius, looking for another drive so I could have the recovered data put on it.

"Okay thanks, I'll take it."

I was confident I was in good hands. He said it would work, I went for it. Except it didn't work, the mac couldn't see anything at all.

Back at the Apple store.

"No, you can't do that," new genius says.
"But that guy told me I could," I point him out in a sort of a genius bar line-up.

As apologetic as he was, I felt a little bad that I hadn't shared my former experience with bad drives at our first encounter. Somewhat my own fault, I guess.

So now the happy ending unfolds. Some friends come to the rescue. They transfered the data to their network server, formatted the new drive to HFS, mac-friendly talk, and then transfered the data from the network back onto my drive. My digital life is back in my possession. Time to start thinking about setting up a proper network.