It’s nice to see Taiwan attempting to advertise. I saw this video on a city bus in Taipei on my last visit (at least parts of it.) It always seemed appropriate that you’d show travel inducements to people who’ve already arrived in the country.
I can sing better than Mr. “Taiwan will touch your heart”. Maybe I should record my own soulful ballad to the island of Taiwan…
Everyone has Spam – at least, everyone with e-mail (unless you’re John C. Dvorak), but, apart from thinking about the nuisance, did you ever give any thought to it?
Generally, I hadn’t, I don’t need a new Rolex or to have a body part enlarged, nor do I need (or want) prescription medicine. And most certainly, I do not need stock tips!
But according to a recent New Scientist article spammers are actually onto a winner with this one.
They buy, then recommend cheapo stocks. Some people apparently buy them based on spam tips and the price rises. These stocks might be purchased for $0.02 a share, and even a minor movement in price yields an enormous percentage increase for anyone holding the stock.
I can only imagine that people who buy these stocks are thinking the exact same thing – that they’ll get onboard soon enough to get make a significant profit. At least, I hope that’s their motivation and not just that they’re dumb as posts.
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Yesterday, I made the final determination that there was no hope for fixing my MacBook short of a logic board replacement, and so I began the long, slow process of backing up my data, settings, applications, e-mails and all the other little things you never remember until you’ve formatted the hard drive.
.Mac accounts are overpriced, but the integration with OSX did make for for convenient backup options. Obviously, I couldn’t backup a full 120GB computer to a 1GB .Mac account, but you can use backup to store all your application settings (normally stored in .plist files), plus all my e-mail, bookmarks, calendar items, etc.
As part of my diagnostic process, I’d made a bootable clone of my drive on an external firewire device, and that acts as my “ultimate” backup – at least I know everything is there.
And then it came time to format the drive and re-install. The computer had been behaving pretty well all day Sunday, but as soon as I started to try to boot the install CD, the system started playing shut down tag with me. Every time I’d try to boot the CD it would drop before I’d even get to the Apple screen.
This continued about 20 times and then it loaded and installed normally.
Once loaded, I installed my purchased programs that I regularly use (Ecto, Parallels, etc) and I decided to test the .mac backup and loaded everything down from .mac. It worked flawlessly. All the settings were intact once done. It really worked great.
I ran my re-loaded computer long enough for it to power off a couple more times and decided that there was nothing for it but to contact Apple.
My choices were two: Contact Apple by phone, or try out the Genius Bar at the Apple store.
I was still dreaming of the possibility that they’d just replace my MacBook on the spot rather than sending off for repair, so I decided to try the Genius Bar. I’d never used the Genius Bar and online discussion seemed mixed about it. I’ve seen them in action and my impression was mixed also.
I decided to go in as armed as possible, and prepared a detailed list of everything I’d done by way of diagnostics. When I got up this morning I logged on the store’s website and booked the first available “Mac” support opening, 12:20PM.
I arrived at 12:00, prepared to wait. Their support ticket system, which shows who’s next was busted, so they had to deal with every person that wanted help by taking their name and manually assigning a slot. At first I was concerned that, perhaps they didn’t have my name, but the ticker came up briefly and my name was there on the list.
At about 12:30 they called me up.
I talked with the Genius for a few minutes, described what I had done, showed him my documentation and he completely agreed that it was a bad logic board and off my MacBook went to the service depot.
One thing of interest, I saw one of the bulging Macbook Pro batteries returned while I was there. The guy showed it to the Genius and, although they had no “spare” batteries in stock, the removed one from a boxed MacBook Pro and sent the guy on his way in minutes. No muss, no fuss, no hassle. I must say, my experience was almost as painless as it could get. My wait wasn’t much passed my scheduled time, the tech seemed to know what he was doing – more importantly, he recognized that I knew what I was talking about.
Despite the massive uprising of people on the net who are supposedly experiencing this same problem, the Genius had never seen one before.
When I got home, I pulled out the old iBook (Not that old, actually) used my .mac backup to bring it up to speed and everything is working normally. Hopefully, my MacBook will be back this week or early next.
Orgismo.com => Japan Railway passengers to generate electricity at train stations
The East Japan Railway Company… …is testing an experimental system that produces electricity as people pass through ticket gates. JR claims that this sort of human-powered electricity generation system may provide a portion of the electricity consumed at train stations in the future.
Having been in a Japanese train station at rush hour I know that there’s a vast amount of energy surging through the building, so this seems like a great idea.
But knowing the Japanese, they’ll adopt this on the subways and perhaps even implement a little system to redirect some of the electricity generated and impart a mild shock into the genitals of the men passing through the gates – just to get them in the mood to read their hardcore porn and grope the female passengers.
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What’s Swedish meatballs without noodles?
I’ll tell you what: It’s not enough food. You have to eat more meatballs to fill up than a proper Swedish meatballs and noodles dish.
IKEA, being Swedish, doesn’t serve noodles with their meatballs. Just because the Swedish invented the Swedish meatball does not make it right to serve them without noodles.
In any case, they don’t and so here’s the problem – you have to eat more to get a filling meal. Their meatball dinners come in 10, 15 and 20 meatball sizes, but the 15 meatball “regular” plate is their featured item.
So what’s the difference between the 15 and the 20 meatball plate?
Answer: Apparently not enough. That is, visually not enough for the clerks to be able to tell them apart when they rang them up. It used to be every time we went to IKEA, I would ask for the 20 meatball plate and get charged for the 15 meatball plate. Of course, that makes it a great deal for me, but, by the same token, probably a crummy deal for the poor slob who purchased the 10 meatball plate and gets charged for the 15.
That went on for a long time, but apparently someone noticed the meatball inventory wasn’t matching revenues and suddenly they began sending “signals” with the food to the cashiers.
15 meatball plates now have a flag with them, while the others do not.
While this system appears to be more reliable, it’s subject to a classic “man in the middle” attack. All you have to do is insert your own “message” (little swedish flag) into the packet (the 20 meatball plate) between the source (server) and destination (cashier).
Violà ! The destination misreads the packet and abnormal results occur.
Disclaimer: The Lone Locust does not endorse fraudulent activities designed to get 5 free meatballs. It’s not really worth it, is it?
The Ted Lee Experiment => When bad customer service turns good
Today I got a call from a man from Apple who identified himself as Steve Job’s personal assistant. Jobs had gotten my email and instructed his assistant to make the necessary calls to get my laptop fixed and returned back to me in time for WWDC. His assistant also mentioned that Steve found my line about “going to WWDC without a laptop is like going to war with a bannana†funny. Ha. I made Steve Jobs laugh today. How about that.
So, does anyone know any particular type jokes that Steve Jobs likes?
I’ve got to haul mine into the Apple store on Monday and desperately cannot be without a computer while it gets repaired. I wonder if “iJoke: The biographical story of Steve Jobs’ Sense of Humour” is available at the Apple store?
Technorati Tags: Blog, Computer, Mac, Macbook, OSX, Problems
We finally put together Michelle’s new IKEA bed.
Usually, I don’t find IKEA furniture particularly difficult to assemble, but this was just a royal pain.
It wasn’t difficult to understand or follow the directions, it’s just when you start with a bag of hardware the size of a 10lb bag of supermarket ice, you know you’re in for an evening’s fun.
We moved the bed to the opposite side of the room from her old bed so that, during the night, when she bumps the walls, she’ll stopping waking up her brother in the next room.
Now she’ll be waking us up.
TV Scoop => Return of The Rani
Back when I was a lad…er…OK slightly more than a lad – we’re talking the 80s – one of Doctor Who’s most evil enemies (and you know he had a whole slew of evil enemies, so think cream of the crop, head honcho, with a heart even blacker than the blackest black of Douglas Adams’ black controls which are labeled in black on a black background, where a small black light lights up all black to let you know you’ve used one) was The Rani.
Said report goes on to indicate that the Rani will be returning on next season’s Doctor Who.
What is this dreadful fascination with the Rani?
She was a terribly overrated character, a one-dimensional cipher (pretty much like the Master in the JNT days) spouting cliched lines and chewing up the scenery like it was gingerbread. She appears in only two episodes, Mark of the Rani and Time and the Rani, two of the awful travesties that Pip & Jane Baker inflicted on the DW world.
And let’s not forget to mention Kate O’Mara, who was hottie when she was guest starring in shows like The Saint in the 60’s, but by the time she appeared in Doctor Who in the 80’s she was passed her prime. She’d aged well, but aged she had – at least past the age where fans should have been drooling over her.
Obviously, they want her back because she’s (a) A Time Lord (b) Female. It will give the Doctor something to think about… like, re-populating the species.
“Doctor Who – The Mark of the Rani (Episode 140)” (BBC Warner)
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Today I’ve pretty much eliminated everything else I could on the MacBook problems.
It’s a dud motherboard.
Follow up to More Macbook Weirdness
I found a nice write-up on the Apple Support forum for Macbooks concerning the random power off problem. I’d already tested most of these things, but I tried them a bit more methodically today.
Having found that an iDVD render could consistently cause the machine to shut down (after an unknown length of time), as could VisualHub running a transcode of a video file, I began to systematically eliminate everything I could.
I used multiple terminal windows running the ‘yes’ command to crank the CPU utilization up to maximum for hours, and the system didn’t shut down.
I reset the PMU and PRAM and the system still shuts down.
I created a new user account and was able to run both iDVD and VisualHub to successful conclusion, but then the system shut itself off while idling.
I’ve also run the Apple Hardware tests successfully – but on the second pass, the system shut down, which, to my mind eliminates the possibility that it is my OS install, since the hardware test boots a distinct OS environment on the DVD.
Tomorrow, I’ll re-seat my RAM and HDD. Fortunately, I have another set of RAM which I can try swapping out.
After that, it seems undeniable that this is a solid gold hardware failure of something core to the MacBook itself.
I’ve been putzing along on this diagnosis in the hopes that Apple will solve this problem – or at least acknowledge it – and come up with a suitable replacement program.
I really cannot afford to send my MacBook for a logic board replacement – even with the random failures, it’s my primary computer system with all my critical data and programs on it.
Technorati Tags: Apple, Blog, Computer, Mac, Macbook, OSX, Problems