Flirting with Danger

I am flirting with danger with the two parts of my new portable harddrive.

Equation of the Day: Laptop + Marble Surface = Bad

So, it turns out that computer hard drives tend to have some serious issues after a computer is dropped onto a 200-year-old marble surface. (This week's life lesson: laptops + marble surfaces = bad.) Does anybody have any name suggestions for the name of my new computer? (As you might recall, my current one is called "Hourglass", in honor of a certain character and very much with a pun intended on its lifespan.) Applecare is still going for the current computer, so I am going to try to get that repaired as soon as the new computer arrives. I'll thus need a new hard drive name for the present machine as well. I should also mention that my last hard drive failure occurred right after my only other trip to Italy, so I might need to stay away from that country.

By the way, here are the specs for my new computer (I hope it's readable even with the copy and paste):

MacBook 15 inch 1 Z0GH

MacBook Pro 15-inch Glossy Widescreen 1 065-8668
Display

Keyboard (US) & User's Guide (English) 1 LL065-8482
Country kit 1 065-8484

500GB Serial ATA Drive @ 5400 rpm 1 065-8667

Mini DisplayPort to VGA Adapter 1 065-8472

SuperDrive 8X (DVD+R DL/DVD+RW/CD-RW) 1 065-8466

Mini DisplayPort to DVI Adapter 1 065-8468

Apple Remote 1 065-8476

8GB 1066MHz DDR3 SDRAM - 2x4GB 1 065-8458

3.06GHz Intel Core 2 Duo 1 065-8455

EMEA CC-HE contract uplift MacBook 1 S2366 (aka, Applecare)

HP Photosmart C4580 all-in-one 1 TS420 (my first ever printer!)



This computer is the most expensive Mac laptop ever purchased from Oxford's Mathematical Institute. (I am paying for it with money from my McDonnell grant that was set aside for a high-end laptop.) It is almost the most expensive laptop purchased through the MI, but one from back in the day when laptops were much more expensive slightly trumps it. It is nowhere close to the most expensive computer purchased through the MI, so I'll be sure to let you know if I ever approach that.

Oh, and why I am so giddy right now even though I was just in a shitty mood from this conference and am now spending lots of time getting my data back-up situation in order (there was a bit of comedy of errors involved there as well): Simple. It's because I'm getting a fucking powerful computer that will probably give me my biggest performance jump ever when compared to my previous computer.

Three Cheers for my Phylactery!

My MacBook Pro decided to have a conniption today. With a massive amount of help from a local (Christopher Voyce), my computer (Vecna) seems to be working again, although when I saw the same behavior for my G4 back in Atlanta, it was a sign that my harddrive was on the way out. (Indeed, it failed for good a couple to a few months after that.) Hence, I'm not convinced the issues won't crop up again, but right now the computer appears to be working perfectly so if I went to the Apple Store, it would just work and they'd wonder why I'm there. (I could just go ahead and buy a harddrive on my own and assume this one is on borrowed time, but what if it isn't? One thing I now have done is buy the Leopard-compatible version of DiskWarrior because unlike the last time this happened, I didn't have DiskWarrior here to help me out.)

By the way, the observed behavior that I mentioned above was when I noticed iTunes suddenly coughing when it tried to play a song---like it was having hiccups. Then when I did a verify with Disk Utility, I was getting an 'invalid node structure' error. I thought that only happened with social networks! :) At first the OS 10.5 install DVD didn't want to install anything on my harddrive, so I was thinking that I needed to head off immediately (i.e., tomorrow, as the places were going to be closed by the time I got there today---the nearest Apple Store is in Southampton, so I would have needed to get on the train) to deal with it. However, after going to the office to get some stuff (like a possible backup computer), we came back and were able to install 10.5 on my harddrive. We had to erase everything on there, so I am currently copying stuff from Phylactery, which is my back-up hard drive. Once I saw the first conniptions today, I immediately backed up my documents. Otherwise, the back-ups date from July 17th (i.e., right before I left for Rome) and the only changes since then that weren't to documents were some podcasts that I can redownload. Anyway, the back-up business is the explanation for this blog entry's title.

The giant Rome blog is coming, but because of today's events, I'm not in the mood to do it at the moment. Today was going to be a chance for me to revamp a section of a particular article, but that will now have to be done tomorrow. It can't be helped and in any event I really don't want to deal with it now. I will finally deal with a couple of software things now that I need to do some reinstallation anyway. Namely, I am downloading Firefox 3 and I will switch over from the Caltech-licensed copy of Matlab to the Oxford one. Moreover, I will download Oxford's copy of Mathematica, as my inertia had led me to not bother with that after my Caltech-licensed one expired.

I also found out that everybody who works in my building apparently gets a 10% discount at the ice cream place I frequent. The person behind the counter mentioned that they don't like to publicize this. I estimated that since October, this has cost me about 100 pounds---which is not enough to affect my life but definitely enough to annoy me. The thing I have to do, of course, is treat this as a sunk cost and enjoy my discount from now on. There isn't anything else I can do. I wonder how many of my colleagues in Dartington House have been paying more for ice cream than necessary? Well, since the ice cream bar won't publicize this discount, I will. (Colleagues: When you go to G & D's, make sure to mention that you work upstairs so that you can get your 10% discount! And for those of you who did know about this before, I think from now on we should make sure that all the new people know about this from the very beginning of their time here. If we don't tell them, they have no way of knowing, and that's just not the right way to do things.)

Anyway, I love my Phylactery. :)