Tech Heads and Slick Heads
It's been another insidiously long week.
Not the least of my problems has been...gasp!...my Mac! How COULD it be so?? Well...
They have a new operating system out now, and I've been jazzed about this thing for months. Really. And part of what I love about it is the way it browses files...you literally flip through them as though they were printed sheets of paper. You see previews of them. That's worth the price of admission right there, because when I have a huge list of files named things like LogoA, LogoB, and LogoC, I can't recall which one I named which after a good six weeks. So.
I was one of the first in line to get the new OS when it came out. I had Leopard. Life was good.
I installed it. And it was still good.
And then came disappointment #1: It refused to open InDesign. That's a fairly big deal...I work a great deal with InDesign, I NEED that program! Oh, but, surely they'll come out with a patch for that, right? I'll just wait a week or so, and all will be well. I checked lots of the online forums and such, and apparently I'm not the only one with this issue. LOTS of designers were caught off-guard by this, and while a few managed to overcome it, there were others who were staring at hard deadlines with no software to run. Bad.
Disappointment #2, it wouldn't preview InDesign documents in the nice visual way I was looking for, nor would it preview .eps files. Another big hit. But at least it read the others, the other programs were working OK.
Then it wouldn't allow me to post to Blogger, which seemed just plain stupid. How could it possibly interfere with THAT?
In desperation, and per the advice of much of the Mac community and my own dear prof, I decided to ... gulp ... erase the entire laptop (AIEEEE!), do a clean install of the OS (instead of just an upgrade) and reinstall the software. So I blew away the whole thing, did the clean install, only to find that NONE of the specialized software I have would run!! Doug was sure he could fix that, it would just be a few days away, and I continued to plug away at it, slowly restoring my data from the network.
The final, fatal blow came when I tried to download the synch software for the Treo 650. (I am not yet lucky or rich enough to have an iPhone, you see.) There isn't a version for Leopard. I do a few searches. And souls more brave than I are reporting that if you attempt to synch using the previous version (which was my next move), the OS tended to happily blow away all your data off the phone for you. Possibly porting it into the Calendar application, but if you synch again, it blows it away from both the phone and the machine. Lost. Gone. Forever.
Well, that's it. No software, no blog, no contacts, no events. That pretty much boils my machine down to an internet/email machine, and while that's all good and fine, it isn't very productive.
In retrospect, I gotta say that the new OS is great...the previews are wonderful, my Unix-guru spouse says that the underpinnings of the software are SO MUCH stronger and better than the previous version, it's just simply that either the OS isn't ready for prime time, or the rest of the world hasn't caught up with it yet.
So I spent the evening yet again blowing away the hard drive, and installing the old OS all over again. Hooking up the mail settings, getting it to connect to the wireless. Doug will have to put it back on the network, I don't know the admin crap to do all that. I still have the disk, obviously, and I think we're going to install it on the Mini and use that as a test machine, and wait another 4-6 months until the right number of patches come out to make this work well. I just caught it on the bleeding edge.
So those are my woes for the computer. I also see that the hard drive failure for these particular machines is horribly high...the read/write head tends to come off and carve deep gouges into the HD plate, and there's a real data loss risk. Backups now go from a nice idea to an absolute necessity. The company will take care of the machine if it crashes and dies, but they can't restore your data if it isn't backed up. Joy.
Let's see...what else did we do? We went to Frontiers and learned a lot about bats. Both kids had a cold at the time, but they fared alright. We went to a park and tasted some things that bats pollinate for us (guava juice, papayas, bananas, cashews, etc.), we read the book Stellaluna, we answered lots of true-or-false questions about bats (like they are NOT dirty and they're way too smart to get caught in your hair), we made some paper bats, we nailed together wooden bat houses, we learned that mommy bats find their baby bats by smell. They had a neat exercise where there was a plate full of cottonballs soaked with different scents/perfumes. You picked one and sniffed it and then went to a big basket FULL of cottonballs and sniffed each one to try and find a match, so you were "finding your baby bat." And we rented a zoocase from the zoo all about bats, too.
We went to our Den Meeting tonight, and apparently the theme was Indian Nation, so the boys made "vests" out of grocery bags which they crumpled, cut and drew on, and they made feather headdresses. They talked about what the plains indians in particular lived in, what they hunted, how they hunted. They had a set of deer antlers that they clacked together, and explained that Native Americans used to bring a set of antlers out with them and clack them together like that to simulate the sound of deer fighting in order to attract a buck to their hiding place. (And news to me, but female deer are apparently called "slick heads" in hunting parlance.) And the Den Leader who is the hunter brought out a first-grader-sized long bow and set of arrows. To say that the boys were excited is a complete understatement. They were nuts. So they took turns taking the kids out, and they shot the arrows at a cardboard box "target" in the yard, and after everyone had gone, they brought them inside around the table and said, "OK, so now you guys have gone out hunting with the bows and arrows, and you shot the deer, so now you're sitting around the teepee getting ready to eat." At which point one of our Den Leaders pulls out a bag of DEER JERKY. (Uh....let's see, cloven hoof, chews its cud...yes, deer are kosher. Eat up.) I didn't know if David was going to come unglued or not. He sort of has a "thing" for deer. And strangely enough, we talked the other day about how deer were probably kosher and we could eat them...it's just that it was kind of unusual to do so, and not many people did, but that it was acceptable. He shook his head and didn't like the idea much and I shrugged. So I wondered what he would do. All the boys were yelling, "Is this REAL? Is that REAL?"
"Yes, it's real deer meat."
"For REAL?"
"Yes, for real. That's really deer."
David took a piece and examined it. It didn't have antlers or soft, dewy eyes, so he took a tentative bite. His eyebrows went up. He took another bite.
He ended up eating the whole thing.
My favorite part was the fact that they passed out Capri Sun fruit juice, deer jerky and Cheez-Its.
*** ROTFLOL!!! ***
Deer and Cheez-Its!!! HA! Authentic Native American cuisine! HA HA HA HA!!!!
*sniff!* *wheeze!* Oh, my. I know, I'm just spoiled because of the buffalo stew they used to give us for Day on the Prairie and such.
I've been giggling all night over this. I poked Doug in the ribs and said, "HA! That sounds like a bunch of men, doesn't it? 'Man, I'm sure glad my wife is back. Been livin' on deer, Cheez-Its and beer for a week now!'"
"And Oreos," he said. "Don't forget Oreos."
"Mmmm. Dunked in beer. Aren't those the four food groups?"
"Oh, of course!"
"No, wait! The four food groups are deer, beer, Cheez-Its and Twinkies!"
"TWINKIES! Oh, that's even better than the Oreos!"
Ah, and for a grand finale, one of the Leaders ("against his better judgement") pulled out several segments of PVC pipe, gave one to each boy, and then they talked about hunting even smaller animals, and how you couldn't use a bow and arrow. With a small bag of mini marshmallows in hand, he then proceeded to introduce the concept of a blow gun to the boys. Have you ever been in a room of 10 little boys with hollow plastic pipes and marshmallow ammunition? They even had a target set up inside, and they had a GREAT time! They ended the meeting, and even did another round of arrow shooting for whoever wanted to go again. David thought this was SO fun, and he was really glad to get to do it again. "Last time I shot the arrow at the ground," he said rather sadly. But with LOTS of help from the Den Leader (these guys are SO patient!) he landed the arrow into the target with a loud "THWACK!" and the other Leader dropped down to his knees and shouted "All RIGHT, David, gimme five!" He did, too, and you could see him just about to burst with pride. (So...who wants to take bets on the appearance of a future post in regard to long bows and David's dad? Anyone?)
Oh yeah! And the Den Leader has a dog...a HUGE dog. David saw a segment on Ruff Ruffman (television show for kids) which showed dog sledding, and this sent him off on a tangent about wanting a "Husky dog" ever since. Well. The Den Leader HAS a giant HUSKY. David was estatic. "Mom! A Husky dog!"
Not the least of my problems has been...gasp!...my Mac! How COULD it be so?? Well...
They have a new operating system out now, and I've been jazzed about this thing for months. Really. And part of what I love about it is the way it browses files...you literally flip through them as though they were printed sheets of paper. You see previews of them. That's worth the price of admission right there, because when I have a huge list of files named things like LogoA, LogoB, and LogoC, I can't recall which one I named which after a good six weeks. So.
I was one of the first in line to get the new OS when it came out. I had Leopard. Life was good.
I installed it. And it was still good.
And then came disappointment #1: It refused to open InDesign. That's a fairly big deal...I work a great deal with InDesign, I NEED that program! Oh, but, surely they'll come out with a patch for that, right? I'll just wait a week or so, and all will be well. I checked lots of the online forums and such, and apparently I'm not the only one with this issue. LOTS of designers were caught off-guard by this, and while a few managed to overcome it, there were others who were staring at hard deadlines with no software to run. Bad.
Disappointment #2, it wouldn't preview InDesign documents in the nice visual way I was looking for, nor would it preview .eps files. Another big hit. But at least it read the others, the other programs were working OK.
Then it wouldn't allow me to post to Blogger, which seemed just plain stupid. How could it possibly interfere with THAT?
In desperation, and per the advice of much of the Mac community and my own dear prof, I decided to ... gulp ... erase the entire laptop (AIEEEE!), do a clean install of the OS (instead of just an upgrade) and reinstall the software. So I blew away the whole thing, did the clean install, only to find that NONE of the specialized software I have would run!! Doug was sure he could fix that, it would just be a few days away, and I continued to plug away at it, slowly restoring my data from the network.
The final, fatal blow came when I tried to download the synch software for the Treo 650. (I am not yet lucky or rich enough to have an iPhone, you see.) There isn't a version for Leopard. I do a few searches. And souls more brave than I are reporting that if you attempt to synch using the previous version (which was my next move), the OS tended to happily blow away all your data off the phone for you. Possibly porting it into the Calendar application, but if you synch again, it blows it away from both the phone and the machine. Lost. Gone. Forever.
Well, that's it. No software, no blog, no contacts, no events. That pretty much boils my machine down to an internet/email machine, and while that's all good and fine, it isn't very productive.
In retrospect, I gotta say that the new OS is great...the previews are wonderful, my Unix-guru spouse says that the underpinnings of the software are SO MUCH stronger and better than the previous version, it's just simply that either the OS isn't ready for prime time, or the rest of the world hasn't caught up with it yet.
So I spent the evening yet again blowing away the hard drive, and installing the old OS all over again. Hooking up the mail settings, getting it to connect to the wireless. Doug will have to put it back on the network, I don't know the admin crap to do all that. I still have the disk, obviously, and I think we're going to install it on the Mini and use that as a test machine, and wait another 4-6 months until the right number of patches come out to make this work well. I just caught it on the bleeding edge.
So those are my woes for the computer. I also see that the hard drive failure for these particular machines is horribly high...the read/write head tends to come off and carve deep gouges into the HD plate, and there's a real data loss risk. Backups now go from a nice idea to an absolute necessity. The company will take care of the machine if it crashes and dies, but they can't restore your data if it isn't backed up. Joy.
Let's see...what else did we do? We went to Frontiers and learned a lot about bats. Both kids had a cold at the time, but they fared alright. We went to a park and tasted some things that bats pollinate for us (guava juice, papayas, bananas, cashews, etc.), we read the book Stellaluna, we answered lots of true-or-false questions about bats (like they are NOT dirty and they're way too smart to get caught in your hair), we made some paper bats, we nailed together wooden bat houses, we learned that mommy bats find their baby bats by smell. They had a neat exercise where there was a plate full of cottonballs soaked with different scents/perfumes. You picked one and sniffed it and then went to a big basket FULL of cottonballs and sniffed each one to try and find a match, so you were "finding your baby bat." And we rented a zoocase from the zoo all about bats, too.
We went to our Den Meeting tonight, and apparently the theme was Indian Nation, so the boys made "vests" out of grocery bags which they crumpled, cut and drew on, and they made feather headdresses. They talked about what the plains indians in particular lived in, what they hunted, how they hunted. They had a set of deer antlers that they clacked together, and explained that Native Americans used to bring a set of antlers out with them and clack them together like that to simulate the sound of deer fighting in order to attract a buck to their hiding place. (And news to me, but female deer are apparently called "slick heads" in hunting parlance.) And the Den Leader who is the hunter brought out a first-grader-sized long bow and set of arrows. To say that the boys were excited is a complete understatement. They were nuts. So they took turns taking the kids out, and they shot the arrows at a cardboard box "target" in the yard, and after everyone had gone, they brought them inside around the table and said, "OK, so now you guys have gone out hunting with the bows and arrows, and you shot the deer, so now you're sitting around the teepee getting ready to eat." At which point one of our Den Leaders pulls out a bag of DEER JERKY. (Uh....let's see, cloven hoof, chews its cud...yes, deer are kosher. Eat up.) I didn't know if David was going to come unglued or not. He sort of has a "thing" for deer. And strangely enough, we talked the other day about how deer were probably kosher and we could eat them...it's just that it was kind of unusual to do so, and not many people did, but that it was acceptable. He shook his head and didn't like the idea much and I shrugged. So I wondered what he would do. All the boys were yelling, "Is this REAL? Is that REAL?"
"Yes, it's real deer meat."
"For REAL?"
"Yes, for real. That's really deer."
David took a piece and examined it. It didn't have antlers or soft, dewy eyes, so he took a tentative bite. His eyebrows went up. He took another bite.
He ended up eating the whole thing.
My favorite part was the fact that they passed out Capri Sun fruit juice, deer jerky and Cheez-Its.
*** ROTFLOL!!! ***
Deer and Cheez-Its!!! HA! Authentic Native American cuisine! HA HA HA HA!!!!
*sniff!* *wheeze!* Oh, my. I know, I'm just spoiled because of the buffalo stew they used to give us for Day on the Prairie and such.
I've been giggling all night over this. I poked Doug in the ribs and said, "HA! That sounds like a bunch of men, doesn't it? 'Man, I'm sure glad my wife is back. Been livin' on deer, Cheez-Its and beer for a week now!'"
"And Oreos," he said. "Don't forget Oreos."
"Mmmm. Dunked in beer. Aren't those the four food groups?"
"Oh, of course!"
"No, wait! The four food groups are deer, beer, Cheez-Its and Twinkies!"
"TWINKIES! Oh, that's even better than the Oreos!"
Ah, and for a grand finale, one of the Leaders ("against his better judgement") pulled out several segments of PVC pipe, gave one to each boy, and then they talked about hunting even smaller animals, and how you couldn't use a bow and arrow. With a small bag of mini marshmallows in hand, he then proceeded to introduce the concept of a blow gun to the boys. Have you ever been in a room of 10 little boys with hollow plastic pipes and marshmallow ammunition? They even had a target set up inside, and they had a GREAT time! They ended the meeting, and even did another round of arrow shooting for whoever wanted to go again. David thought this was SO fun, and he was really glad to get to do it again. "Last time I shot the arrow at the ground," he said rather sadly. But with LOTS of help from the Den Leader (these guys are SO patient!) he landed the arrow into the target with a loud "THWACK!" and the other Leader dropped down to his knees and shouted "All RIGHT, David, gimme five!" He did, too, and you could see him just about to burst with pride. (So...who wants to take bets on the appearance of a future post in regard to long bows and David's dad? Anyone?)
Oh yeah! And the Den Leader has a dog...a HUGE dog. David saw a segment on Ruff Ruffman (television show for kids) which showed dog sledding, and this sent him off on a tangent about wanting a "Husky dog" ever since. Well. The Den Leader HAS a giant HUSKY. David was estatic. "Mom! A Husky dog!"
posted by Kelly at
3:02 AM
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