Had another OS X crash just now. I was in iTunes and hit “burn CD”. Spinning beach ball. When I switched to another program, the computer beach-balled out on me an I couldn’t do anything (couldn’t even access the “Force Quit” screen). Had to force a restart by holding down the power button. 3 Days since last crash.
Jaguar Cache Cleaner is a utility designed to provide easy access to numerous OS X maintenance and utility options. When used in combination with OS X’s disk repair tools, it can be very effective in curing many system problems.
Massachusetts, the lone holdout state still suing Microsoft Corp. for antitrust violations, will become the first state to adopt a broad-based strategy of moving its computer systems toward open standards, including Linux ( news -web sites ), the rival operating system to Microsoft’s Windows.
on a Foxtrot far away.
Inquiring minds want to know: does Mark Millard want to be a missionary? Or just play one during Cranium? Heh.
Just got back from seeing David Wilcox in concert. If my life had a soundtrack, his music would be the title track. I’ll write more tomorrow. For now, I’m off to bed to have Rusty Old American Dreams at the Waffle House.
I’m a huge tea drinker. In fact, I was drinking “Tea. Earl Grey. Hot” before a certain starship captain made it popular. I put down about 4-6 cups every morning. So I was glad to see this study. A molecule that is in tea, as well as bacteria and parasites, activates certain components of the immune system called gamma delta T lymphocytes, which are very important as the first line of defense against infection and tumors. Maybe a reason I rarely get sick?
My good friend Giles likes blogs because they can be used to track information over time. I mean, if you’re already posting to it, why not post little snippets and things you may want to remember later?
About a month ago I broke down and bought a new OS X computer. My beloved G3/333 machine was almost to its 7th birthday and was starting to show signs of wear. Since I use my computer every single day and earn my living from it, having a reliable machine is of the utmost importance. I’m willing to pay a little more to get a quality machine (one of the reasons I use a Mac) and do everything I can to keep it in top running condition. I even scrape the hard drive back to “bare metal” every year and reinstall every bit and byte… just to keep virtual dustbunnies from moving in.
Well, the last month hasn’t all been wine and roses, my friends. I won’t bore you with the details, but in the first week I had to reinstall the OS 3 times. Once I got things working, it was much more stable, but I still don’t trust OS X like my old OS 9. I spent about $1350 on a new dual-boot 1.25Ghz machine. The so-called “uncrashable” OS X 10.2 has been anything but. Frequent lockups, 2 kernel panics so far, and various other little OS glitches. Frankly, I still haven’t moved the most critical data over to OS X. I do Quicken on the 9 partition and will probably continue to do so for the forseeable future.
Today alone I’ve had to force a reboot on OS X twice. Once when the computer wouldn’t wake from sleep, and just now when I tried to reboot into 9 to get some work done; the computer just hung during the reboot process and didn’t proceed. And don’t even get me started on my printer problems today. oog.
So I’m going to be posting to my blog whenever I have an OS X crash or other weirdness. I’ll include a short description of the problem for future reference. Since Movable Type lets me file under categories, I’ll be putting these under an “OS X CRASH” category. That way I can come back in a year or 6 months or whatever and see what the performance is like. I did something similar last year in OS 9. I wanted to see how many times my computer locked up in an 8 month period so I kept track. The total? On a 6 year old machine running OS 9.2, I had 7 crashes. In 8 months. I consider myself extremely experienced in OS 9 and can suss out and fix virtually any problem. I’m only moderately experienced in X so I haven’t learned the ins and outs of the OS yet. I’m willing to chalk some of this up to the learning curve, but if Apple wants to sell computers to everyone and their grandma, they need to do some serious stability work on their OS. Not every prospective Apple customer has a computer background or even cares about learning little OS repair/maintenance tricks.
I still believe that Apple makes the best computer out there. I no longer believe that they are as foolproof, crashproof, or errorproof as their marketing suggests. Like Fox Mulder, I want to believe, but the proof is in the numbers. Make me a believer, Apple. I’ll just report the crashes.
2 OS X crashes today. Once when it didn’t wake from sleep, once when I tried to reboot into 9 and it hung before it could quit out of X.
From Wired online: …the creators of the world’s fastest Mac supercomputer insist they opted for Apple because Macs provided significant price and performance benefits over hardware running Linux or any other Unix-based solution.
I am now just 9-12 months away from being technologically able to complete one of my big List items. Good luck to all the teams involved. May you ALL win. If so, there will be more viable launch systems.
Believe it or not, I knew this word. It’s a medical term I learned from Robert, my pre-med college roommate.
If you’re a logophile, be sure to check out “A collection of word oddities and trivia“. Thanks Patrick
A theft-proof computer.
Musician Robert Palmer, 54, died yesterday of a heart attack.
I’m in a friend’s apartment now. Turns out one of the neighbors has an 802.11b connection w/o password protection. Thanks to Mac OS X, I was able to automatically log in and post this. Very cool; and my computer will autologin every time I’m here. Nice
Well, okay, Jennifer is pregnant, but you get the picture. Congrats, man!
House votes for do-not-call registry “Fifty million Americans can’t be wrong“
Tivo for the radio, the (currently) PC-Only internet radio recorder Replay Radio records streaming shows off the internet to be listened to later. Cool!
A monitor to fall in love with. Only $17,000.
Via Yahoo News: A federal court in Oklahoma has blocked the national “do not call” list that would allow consumers to stop most unwanted telephone sales calls, one week before it was due to take effect.
“Doth any man doubt, that if there were taken out of man’s minds vain opinions, flattering hopes, false valuations, imaginations as one would, and the like: but it would leave the minds of a number of men poor shrunken things: full of melancholy and indisposition, and unpleasing to themselves?”
Bacon