eightface

The Items I Carry

The stuff that I usually have in my pockets or bag, my contribution to Naz’s flickr group The Items We Carry, for posterity’s sake.

My list includes: wallet, Oyster, rail card, moleskines, iPod nano, keys, change, Motorola L6 phone, pens, gum and Canon camera. I forgot to include sunglasses, but we’ve been having miserable weather lately.

Old man look at my life

From an interview with Rob Weychert:

If you think of the two media as people, print is a wise old man who is set in his ways, whereas the web is still a child, unformed and full of potential.

The web is about to turn 16 next month, wherein it will come to the conclusion that no one understands it and everyone sucks. It will then proceed to dress entirely in black, listen to angsty music and write bad poetry.

MacBook harddrive failure

The harddrive in my MacBook decided to die on Saturday afternoon. Wasn’t doing much — had a few programs open and was in the process of checking out some books from the British Library. Tried to load up some bibliographic software, got the spinning beachball and most of the programs locked up. So, I did a hard reboot. After turning it back on, I received a grey screen with a blinking folder containing a question mark.

It would have been nice if it was some sort of minor system glitch, but the harddrive is making that ticking death-rattle. Apparently, this kind of failture seems to be a somewhat common problem with MacBook users. The laptop is still under warranty for another month, so I should be able to get a free replacement. Although, there is the problem of the sales receipt being physically located in Canada. I have a Genius Bar appointment Monday morning at the London store, hopefully all goes well.

I had a complete system backup from a few weeks ago, so I’ve only lost two week’s worth of dissertation research. It could have been much worse. My computer is currently operating via the backup on my external drive. SuperDuper is a godsend and is well worth the expense, it allowed me to make a bootable clone of my harddrive. Senuti is also a handy little utility if you want to retrieve music from your ipod.

Let this be a warning to all of my fellow masters students (and everyone in general), make sure you have reliable backups. At least it happened now and not in two months when the dissertation is due.

Update: The Apple Store was willing to replace my harddrive, but I would’ve had to leave the laptop with them for 3-10 days because they didn’t have any 60gb drives in stock. Couldn’t really afford to be without my machine for that length of time, so I decided to replace the harddisk myself.

I picked up a Hitachi Travelstar 160gb drive, installed it in about 15 minutes, and restored from the three-week-old full backup. Everything is up and running again, but I’m now completely paranoid. In the process of making sure that I have copes of photos, music and school files on my web host.