The big purge

Following the unrecoverable crash of Lemming’s (my iBook) hardrive and it’s replacement, I now have a 4-year old iBook G3 900MHz with t 80G hard-drive. Not bad he?

Of course this forced upgrade comes in a specially bad time when I am anticipating the second generation of the MacBook line in order to get me one of the 13’ ones but then, when is an hardware failure of this magnitude ever convenient?

Replacing the drive was especially fun (not!) and it shows the computer’s age and the prowess of Apple’s engineers that they could stuff all those components (which weren’t as miniaturized as they are now, not by a long shot) inside such a small space and still make the laptop as sturdy as it is!

Anyway, the really hard part os all if this was loosing data. Yes, I know I should backup everything important very often. I know it should be done religiously and without fail. I know. I don’t do it.

In the end I could recover most of my stuff from old backups and replication points here and there but not all of it. I made the bed, I’ll lay on it.

Especially funny was the way I recovered all my contact and calendar data. I simply synched and merged everything I had on my cell phone and my Palm. So now I have lots of duplicates and I lost some info (the Mac apps keep a lot more information that any of these devices) but I still have an (old) copy of the info on another Mac so I’ll probably be able to complement it pretty well and loose only a small portion of the data in the end.

So maybe now I’ll do something to the effect of ticking the “Buy Backup External Hard-drive” item off my to-do list…

But not all of it was bad, I lost my recent RSS subscriptions and after dropping the ones I had dropped already along the way I got to a decent number of feeds again so this purge may not have been all that bad… Plus, you can’t beat the feeling of a fresh install. Pure joy!

Technorati Tags: ibook

The Pixies

Let me get this out of the way first: I’m biased. I’m a huge Pixies fan and I freely admit it, OK?

Well then, now that that’s out of the way… :-)

Yesterday’s concert was simply superb. I had such a good time it was unbelievable!

It went down as it usually does with them: get on stage, play all the songs end-to-end, note-perfect and completely ignore the audience (except for Kim’s timid attempts at a few “thank yous” and “hellos” barely audible above the applause and cheers). Nothing’s changed in that respect.

The only gripes I have about the concert are the encore’s choice of song (Here Comes Your Man for an audience of essentially hard-core fans is a bad, bad choice…) and the fact that they didn’t play The Happening but Hey! (pardon the pun), you can’t have everything and they did play something like an hour and a half almost non-stop.

Some kids were going on, after the show, about how they will never again go to see any dinosaurs’ concerts and how they didn’t like the show all that much. Well, I can totally understand where they’re coming from —from a show or entertainment point of view it was a very poor concert— but these are The Pixies, what in the world did they expect?

Also I must say I rather liked the band that opened up the show. I’d never heard of them before and only just found out their name: The Vicious 5, a Portuguese band from Lisbon who played for some 20-odd minutes and gave a show far more envolved than the Pixies themselves. Very noisy rock mind you, but very well played.

Technorati Tags: concert, live, music, pixies, shows

Shameful pleasures

Yay! I made it to this week’s Contrast Podcast!

So now you can get over there and see what I admit to listening in my younger days… And you might as well listen to it because it is all good!

PS - If you can’t find my contribution there look for it under “Nuno from Undercover Songs” ;-)

The horror

First came the freeze.

No warning, no previous failures, no noise, nothing that could have warned me about it. In fact, I have a small app running continuously on the background checking the disk via S.M.A.R.T. and it never said a thing.

Nevertheless… it froze. Weird. But then I was just setting up a iSight camera for the first time so the thought was pretty obvious “What, firewire crashes? USB I’m used to but firewire? Come on!”

Then came the hard reboot. Ssh’ing into the machine was impossible so it was finger on the button for a while until it powered down.

And, finally, understanding dawned. It wouldn’t boot. It would just sit there making all those clunking noises and then give up and show me the icon for “so where’s my disk then?”

Yup, for all my efforts up until now it seems that my trusty old lemming (the iBook) is in dire need of a new hard drive. The last desperate attempt will be latter today at home, but I’m not holding my breath.

Sniff!

Music, conferences and everything

The long, pregnant silence… :-)

This is a summary of what I’ve been up to recently and what I expect to be up to in the near future.

I’ve been on vacation for the past two weeks and it accounts for some of the down-time.

I did manage to be “semi-active” and pre-produced and launched two episodes of the Undercover Songs podcast during that time. I even replied to some comments on the blog.

Got a submission in for the next episode of the Contrast podcast. I missed the one about the best Beatles Covers because the submissions where held during my vacation —and I did have a few very good ones— so to make up for it I exposed one of the skeletons I’ve held in my closet for the past years and contributed with one of the songs I liked when I was 16. It will be episode 16 and it should be out by next tuesday if all goes well.

It is now only a matter of bureaucracy inside my company for me to become registered as an attendee at the upcoming EuroOSCON2006 conference. It promises to be both a lot of fun and also a very fruitful event. I can hardly wait for it.

It is also a matter of bureaucracy the registration for the YAPC::Europe::2006 conference. I’ll be enjoying the rest of this year’s vacations in the UK at that time and I decided to go to the conference at Birmingham and then meet up with my wife for a week in Statford-upon-Avon and it’s whereabouts.

During my vacation I finished reading Cut by Cut and I must say I really enjoyed it. It is really more of a handbook for the film editor but I learned a lot from it about what goes on in the editing room of a film or video and I think I’ll enjoy reading In The Blink of an Eye all the more for it (if I can get a copy of it that is, Amazon has been delaying delivery due to stock failure for weeks and weeks…)

The thing that got left behind was the foray into Cocoa programming, since I only did some small advancements into the Programming in Objective-C book and just when it is getting good… Oh well, I’ll get to it eventually.

Technorati Tags: conferences, music, podcast, video