Transplant Surgery

About a week before Christmas we had a bit of an emergency. Nothing life-threatening, but still pretty traumatic at the time. We turned our iMac off for the night and the next day when I turned it on, the OS wouldn't start. I played around with it for about 2 days and then did some serious troubleshooting. My not-so-expert evaluation was that the hard-drive failed. This could easily be fixed by bringing it in to an Apple store and they would replace the harddrive under the AppleCare warranty. Unfortunately, at the time I bought the iMac, I chose to upgrade the RAM and HDD rather than buy the extended warranty. D'oh! So I did what any computer-geek wannabe would do: I bought a new harddrive, opened up the iMac and swapped out the harddrive by myself. Super easy to do and I doubled the storage capacity. Only problem is the data recovery part on the old failed harddrive is going to cost a lot of money. I'm putting it off until Celia really really really needs something from it.

One More Thing...

So yesterday Apple announced their new tablet device, the iPad. I realize that the name isn't great but it kinda makes sense. It shows a connection to their #1 device, the iPod and it resembles a pad (of paper). Why do people immediately think of feminine hygiene products? There are other things called pads. Do you think of a menstrual pad when you refer to protective gear in hockey? or when you're writing on a pad of paper? or if you use a heating pad? Seriously, why would you compare a tablet device to menstrual pad? Grow up. Anyway, the new iPad has taken a lot of flak for being a big letdown. People want it to multitask, they want it to make phone calls, they want it for video conferencing, and they want it to pleasure them in obscene ways. Steve Jobs never said it was meant to any of these things. Email, music, ebooks, photos, and browsing are all it is really meant to do. Okay, I agree that the browsing is a bit of a fail with out flash support but if you've ever surfed on an iPhone for any length of time, you're used to it not working anyway. Still sucks, but you get used to it. I personally like this new device. It is exactly something that I've always wanted. I don't want a laptop - you can't use it in portrait mode, you pretty much have to sit it on your lap or a table, and you have to open it to use it. The tablet turns on just as fast as your iPhone (don't even try to tell me your laptop is ready to go that fast), its a convenient size and shape, and it does exactly what it was meant to do. It is not a laptop replacement, nor a smartphone alternative. Like he said, it is something inbetween. Yes, it is missing a few things, namely a usb port and an sd card slot, but otherwise, I think it fills the role for which it was made quite well.

Where Did You Go?

I've been away for a while. It's totally not my fault though, I've been so busy with... stuff. Okay okay, it's completely my fault. My bad. Sorry. Let's just have a quick summary of the crap in my head over at the moment.

Did you know you only needed on space after a period? I mean when you're typing, not when you're handwriting, dummy. You're probably wondering "when did this change?" Well, it wasn't that long ago, it was just with the invention of the word processor on a computer. Well I still like to have 2 spaces and I'm not submitting anything to a publisher so tough shit.

Remember when Michael Jackson died last summer? What were you doing when you found out? Anyway, I got into a debate with my co-workers about this. I'm a huge fan and I think he was a musical genius. Some (most) people I work with think he was a freaky pedophile. They weren't around for the glory years so I don't blame them for not understanding. So anyway, I was watching This Is It and the whole thing is like a documentary about the making of his big concert. I'm telling you again, he was to pop music and dance what Mozart was to the piano and classical music. What Newton was to physics. What Schwarzenegger was to action movies. They changed it all and made it was it is today. Hey, I'm a fan.

Blogging is difficult in the age of Facebook. The problem is that Facebook usually gives me just enough space to make a smart ass comment without having to get into great detail. Blogging almost forces me to explain the joke because there's just so much damn space to type. I promise to try and write here more often so you can read about all the stupid shit in my life.