Not been a real good weekend for computers in my house. My own laptop is having some serious power issues, which I am not sure whether to attribute to the battery or the internal power management. Pulling hard for the former, because I don’t want to have to replace this thing. And yet, it might be feasible…see, the current contents of my laptop are ~154 GB. However, if you remove all the iTunes content and the VMWare virtual machines, the entire remaining contents make up about 38GB. That’s right, 3/4 of my data is all in music, video, and emulated PCs.
As an experiment, I created a virtual Ubuntu system – 512 MB RAM, 8 GB hard drive – and only added four things to the stock Ubuntu install: Skype, the Lifera (sp?) RSS reader, a simple blog-posting client and the Zimbra desktop client. And all the updates obvs. It includes things like Firefox, a music player suitable for streaming Virgin Absolute Radio, Pidgin for IM, OpenOffice if you need it – long story short, there’s the OS and 90% of what I need from a laptop on a regular basis, taking up just under 4 GB. Which in case you were keeping track is 10% of what the same general stuff takes up on my MacBook.
Now, add to that the fact that I could scam up $100 worth of Dell credit from my AmEx points, and all of a sudden, an Inspiron Mini 9 that does all of the above in Ubuntu drops to around $320. Obviously not money I want to spend right now, but if this laptop were to shat the bed, what would I rather lay down: $320 on a mini Linux laptop, or at least $1000 (and probably more like $1500) on a new MacBook?
Now here is the catch: the iMac’s hard drive is near failing. Its SMART status indicates that it is probably beyond saving, just make sure it’s backed up. Since it is completely and utterly backed up, heroic measures to save it are impractical at best (once a drive is failing in SMART, basically all you can do is make sure it’s backed up and then go through its pockets and look for loose change). The bigger issue is that the first-generation Intel iMac is damn near impossible to open and replace a hard drive without doing things like removing the LCD screen and disconnecting thermal sensors and assorted bad nasty things like that. And for other reasons relating to a former job that I can’t really discuss, there’s no way I can have somebody else attempt to service this system (or my laptop for that matter).
What we ended up doing was running to Fry’s over the weekend to pick up a half-gig FireWire drive for $80 (!!!!!!!) and clone the entire failing drive, then boot the iMac from it. It works (kinda sorts; Parallels Desktop is being a bitch right now) but it’s not exactly the sort of solution you could leave running 24/7, which both thwarts my normal wireless-backup scheme and limits my original plan, if my laptop failed, to resort to the iMac as the base station for syncing iPhone and iPod and the general repository for that 75% of my hard drive that consists of tunes and movies.
In other bits of news and thoughts:
* It’s cold out there. In fact, it’s cold enough that I’ve resorted to my international-travel jacket with the fleece vest zipped in. Only thing is, it has nothing in the sleeves, and as a result, it’s not really all that cozy unless you’re wearing a sweatshirt or something (and if you’ve ever worked in an old-ass government building, you know that heaving clothing really isn’t an option once they turn the radiators on). So now I’m sorting through jackets options and wondering if I’m not actually just trying to come up with an excuse to break my 4-year streak of not buying superfluous outerwear.
* IKEA is a mind-altering substance. We have proof. They also sell THE weirdest soda known to man, and it Bothers me.
* One of my favorite things about Christmastime is going through the old James Bond box sets of an evening. Right now we’re in the middle of the Sean Connery retrospective. One of these days I really need to see about getting around to the theater for Quantum of Solace…
* I know they say God has a plan and all, but all I can say is this had better turn out to be one hell of a plan.
* You think I should tell my end-users that Friday is my last day? Naaaaahhhhh….
* Things must really be going tits-up if they’re canceling the Arena Football season. That league has stuck around like a cockroach or a Cassidy brother through thick and thin for 20-something years.
* My last unmarried cousin got engaged last night. I know he’s 25, which is a fossil in Alabama years, but still…I guess this means that media pressure is now focused on my oldest nephew (turning 10 next spring) and I’m not even joking.
* My Buddy Vince Sez, “F you and your gov’t cheese-payin’ job.” (He didn’t get Veteran’s Day off.)
Finis.
Oh man, until you too have had to pull over and fill your wiper fluid tank in 5F weather, with -14F windchills, without gloves (because you are an idiot who forgot them), in the middle of central IL, on a drive that should take 3.5 hours but ends up taking 6 because the whole of the goshdarn state is one sheet of fricking black ice – until then, you cannot in all justice say ‘it’s cold out there.’
(I may still be bitter about my travels today. It’s possible.)