February 2007 Archives

We're not really supposed to be doing Valentine's Day (at least as far as I'm concerned), but I had a great one. Jfer, Magda and I met for lunch at Kerbey, which is quite delightful during the week when you don't have to wait for hours for a table.

Jfer gave me a cool RED iPod Nano. After resisting for a long time, I have now officially become the member of Club iPod. The device is as cool as can be - tiny, with a crisp screen and plenty of memory for my musical tastes. I really like the red color - I'm not the fan of pastel colors in the rest of the, although the black Nano is pretty cool, too.

Now Jfer actually planned the iPod for my birthday, but she wanted me to have it sooner rather than later, so that I'd be more likely to go out running in preparation for the Capitol 10K. Of course, this means I also ought to load up on some accessories, like the Sport Kit and the Sportsuit Relay. Jfer now keeps mentioning that her old iPod is skipping songs and that the Video iPod is "really, really nice." Hmm, don't know what that's all about...

I went for some jewelry and gave Jfer a nice silver necklace with an amethyst and a face made out of carved bone, made by some local artist. I always feel like I'm playing the lottery whenever I'm picking out something for her, but it seems like I hit the jackpot this time. She claims it's her favorite piece of jewelry she'd ever received from me (I'm not sure if that includes the engagement and wedding rings) and her enthusiasm doesn't appear to be fake.

I had recently noticed a serious slowdown on some operations on my iMac. What used to take seconds (hitting certain pages on Apache2 running on my iMac) now would take over a minute. Well, the iMac's 80 gig disk was getting full, so I figured it might have been something related. I deleted large logfiles and then googled around for defragging on MacOS X (overall view is that it's necessary). No good.

But my readings did remind me to check the disk. Which revealed some bad sectors; which explained that one pesky file that refused to be deleted for the last couple of weeks. I installed AppleJack (highly recommended), but it couldn't help me either, since my directory structure was corrupted. Oy!

I ended up cloning my drive with Carbon Copy Cloner (also highly recommended) to an external drive -- which worked except for that one pesky file I didn't really care about. I then got a 300 gig internal drive at Fry's (for less than $100!) and anti-static protection at RadioShack, and, thanks to directions found on the internets, replaced the non-user-accessible hard drive in about an hour. I then used CCC to clone my backup on the new drive and, low and behold, the Mac booted up happily on the new drive!

But although everything was a little faster (a faster, mostly-empty, defragged drive will do that), the original problem didn't go away. Playing around I noticed that I couldn't hit the website on the same machine using http://localhost and eventually I remembered that a couple of weeks ago I was "tweaking" my settings with some info I got online and messed with my net configuration. Sure enough, my localhost mapping was screwed up and the delays were due to failed DNS lookups. Fixing that resolved my slowness issues. Sigh of relief...

Oh well, info from the internets giveth and info from the internets taketh away. I'm not too upset, since it did make me notice that my internal drive was having problems. And now I have a bigger drive, some anti-static protection and an almost full tub of thermal paste to show for it (not as kinky as it sounds). I also hadn't been too worried about my data, since I have been properly backing up ever since The Incident.

So, the moral of the story is to be careful about info from the internets. And to make sure you periodically back up and occasionally check your disks. Not backing up is really inexcusable since it's so easy nowadays. You can get a 250 gig networked backup drive on Amazon for less than $150, including backup software! Or if you want bigger size or RAID protection, the Iomega 1 TB StorCenter even includes a wireless access point. If you've only got one computer, you can probably pick up a bigger or cheaper USB 2 drive on special at your Fry's.