Halloween is coming! Gabi has the decorations started. Camilla is giving us her best scary face.
Here she is getting ready for school today. Great outfit!
Archive for October, 2009
Halloween is Coming
Friday, October 23rd, 2009Einstein's Telescope
Thursday, October 22nd, 2009
Einstein’s Telescope by Evalyn Gates is probably the best random choice I’ve made of a book since I picked up Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel 12 years ago. Wow! I’d heard about gravity lensing, dark matter, dark energy, MACHO and WIMPs, but I’d never seen them discussed in-depth in a readable format before. I’m learning more with each page here than I do in most entire books (What Would Google Do, being a more typical example). This is good science, extremely well done. Highly recommended.
Stone Brewery Growler Parking
Monday, October 19th, 2009
One of the more welcome advances of the last few months – dedicated parking for filling growlers at Stone Brewery in Escondido.
Football Week 6
Monday, October 19th, 2009
If I have my numbers right, Mom is the winner tonight no matter how the game goes. Go Chargers! And safe trip to Mom, Dad and Cally shifting everyone to Indianapolis today.
Service Interruption
Monday, October 19th, 2009
Southern California Edison is doing some work on the lines here, and we will experience a power outage on Tuesday for at least part of the day. Internet traffic will be re-routed to another server, but the blog will probably be down for most of the day. Sorry about that; business sites and email get my first attention.
Windows 7
Friday, October 16th, 2009
So, I got my Macbook Pro laptop back from Apple earlier this week. They replaced everything (logic board, hard drive, battery). It’s a new machine. And a lot of stuff was broken. Time Machine (backups), Triple Boot (for Linux and Windows), other things. Not only has it taken me a long time to fix things, not all of them came back together.
My Triple Boot worked through an Open Source program called rEFIt. rEFIt no longer works reliably. I strongly suspect that Apple has sabotaged it. Here’s why.
While my computer was in the shop, I was using my wife’s laptop. It has a dual boot for Apple and Windows. I’d loaded the beta copy of Windows 7 into her system three or four months before, but now I found myself using it every day. It’s very, very nice. More responsive than the Mac OS, able to read Mac formatted hard drives, networking OK, etc. The only things missing are my iLife programs and my purchased suite of graphic programs for the Mac. This is really a competitive system against Apple’s OS X, at least from an end-user standpoint.
Yes, I prefer the Unix basis of OS X. I think it’s more secure, safer, fiddle-able, etc. But, dang, as a user Windows 7 is sweet.
Not only that, but Ubuntu 9.04 is clearly an effective operating system. It’s still not ready for a real enduser, but it’s very, very close.
Apple now has competition. And it’s serious. And I think they’re purposely making it harder for us to use multiple operating systems on their platforms.
Flu Shots
Thursday, October 15th, 2009Flu shots. All of us. The pain. The torture. Only the strong of heart should click to see more.
John Madden's Football Retirement
Thursday, October 15th, 2009Personally, I think it’s a little over-the-top. But if football is your life, and it clearly is Madden’s, then having this spread AND entertaining football Dad’s is certainly a dream retirement.
Monday Morning Mega Post
Monday, October 12th, 2009I’m mad as hell. Updates to the blog have been minimal for two weeks because my laptop graphics card suddenly died on September 27. I phoned in to Apple and, after determining that it probably wasn’t a software glitch, they had me walk it into the new Temecula Apple Store. After twenty minutes, I was told that they would replace it for free (it was a known problem with the Santa Rosa series MacBook Pro; and subject of a prior class action lawsuit) and that it would take 3 to 5 days.
It is now two weeks later. The login on the Apple site spouts the cryptic phrase, “Product return pending.” Say what?
I’m not the only one who’s had these troubles with Apple. Boing Boing’s Cory Doctorow switched from Apple to IBM/Lenovo due to service problems. “When I was an Apple user, hardware failures often meant standing in line for 40 min to drop off a Powerbook at a Genius Bar, then coming back a week or two later and waiting 40 minutes again to reclaim it.” With IBM, he has an on-site, next day, world-wide, 100% replacement guarantee for $100 a year. For that price, Apple let’s us find our own cellphones on MobileMe. Advantage: IBM/Lenovo.
Last Spring, when my laptop had similar problems, I was forced to buy a second MacBook Pro to use for the three weeks Apple took mine. There was simply no other option; I have a business to run and the laptop is the center of it (with multiple redundant backups, of course). Being in Eastern Europe, it came with a 75% additional markup (which all goes to unrefundable state sales tax and backsheesh to the company that handles Apple in a tertiary market – I know whereof I speak, I used to own an Apple licensee in Russia during the 1990′s).
Anyway, I’m currently working off an image of my original, missing laptop hard drive (one of my three backups). And I’m not waiting any longer to do my posts. Here they are.
Veronica is 2 Months Old
Monday, October 12th, 2009
Veronica turned two months old this weekend. She’s doing very well, thank you. She’s sleeping much less and is far more alert about her surroundings. She helped Dad cheer on Peyton Manning and the Indianapolis Colts to victory last night, sending her encouragements quietly from Dad’s lap.
Aaron successfully stops Veronica from crying during our going-to-bed routine.
March Field, CA
