Month: January 2010

My predictions for tomorrow's event

In the spirit of my post on the last event, I bring you these. five, five Commandments predictions for tomorrow:

  • In keeping with the paintball motif, when the AT&T CEO takes the stage, Tim Cook will come running out with a paintball gun and a walkie-talkie and call in an airstrike.
  • Steve Jobs will descend from the lighting rig in a black, mock turtleneck robe clutching two tablets, and say, “Observe what I command you today. See, I will drive out before you the Windows Users, The Android Users, and those heathens still using a fucking Blackberry.”
  • Steve Jobs will report it was not the care of the transplant surgeons who saved his life, it was this Tablet. To prove his point, he will bring Stevie Wonder on stage, hand him the tablet and Stevie will proclaim he now sees the light.
  • Phil Schiller will demo the new version of Faces in iPhoto dubbed the “No, it really works, version of Faces” However, in a tragic mishap it will think Steve Jobs is a cadavar given to science and Phil is the bearded lady from a circus.
  • Steve Jobs loses the drinking game for how often Phil says “Great. Amazing. Great, It’s that great” during an app demo and is rushed to Betty Ford.

How I didn't want to spend my Friday

This semester, I’m taking a six-week intensive class, and I have a standing date with my parents on Sunday afternoons. Friday is usually game night. I was looking forward to it tonight.

I’ve been working on my MacBook at work a lot and was in the middle of working on a presentation when OS X started acting weird. I’d get little freezes and lockups, even though my processor and memory utilization were low. It felt like I was getting hard lockups every 10 min or so.

Since the Mac was in an unresponsive state, I hit the power button. Usually, OS X springs back to life and everything is wonderful. This time, it took forever to clear the startup gray screen and it hung at the blue screen, alternating showing a gray spinning wheel and not. Trying the usual suspects did nothing. I reset the PMY, NVRAM, and tried a safe boot. No joy. I was able to boot into my Windows 7 partition so I knew it wasn’t likely a hardware fault. A quick Google showed this wasn’t uncommon, and an Archive and Reinstall usually fixed it.

The problem was game night, and my on going belief that Murphy has a sense of humor. If I didn’t go to game night, I’d come home and the reinstall would work. If I went, tomorrow it’d be a nightmare of a reinstall, and I’d probably end up at the Apple Store on a Saturday. So, I sent my regrets.

Naturally, the reinstall went fairly well. There were a few post-install issues, but for the most part everything worked well. I just wish I could have made game night.