And on the 8th day, God invented Excedrine
Posted on November 28, 2007
Filed Under Life | 1 Comment
Everyone has been telling me that I was working and running around at a ridiculous pace, and if I didn’t watch it, I would crash. They were right.
We just got through a period of Eric being home for a grand total of 3 days over a 5 week period (Boston, Australia, Boston, then Zurich). Eric and I dropped the girls off at my Mom’s and took off for an extended Thanksgiving holiday to Eastern Connecticut. We made donations to Foxwoods & Mohegan Sun, shopped for holiday gifts for the kids, relaxed and otherwise reminded ourselves that we are in fact, a married couple that enjoys each other’s company.
Monday I got hit by a cold that quickly turned into something nasty. Don’t want to gross anyone out with the details, but let’s just say that a 101 degree fever and “praying to porcelain” was a big part of my day yesterday. I’m feeling better tonight, thanks to a dose or two of Excedrine that knocked out one of the worst headaches of my life…and I’ve been getting migraines since I was 9. This was worse. The pain of my migraines are more sensory and achy, this was like there was a knife going through one ear and out the other.
Had I been feeling well enough to blog, I would have pointed out that Web Worker Daily has redesigned. What do you think?
And we’re back…
Posted on November 15, 2007
Filed Under Macintosh | 4 Comments
My MacBook Pro is running normally again. I didn’t have to reinstall the OS or wipe the drive.
While in safe mode, I downloaded the 10.4.11 combo updater for Intel Macs and ran it successfully. When I restart the computer, it appeared to have the same issue. After 15 minutes of staring at the spinning wheel and grey Apple logo, I got frustrated and returned to my meeting downstairs (I’m in a hotel room) without force-shutting the computer down. Three hours later, I came back fully expecting to see the spinning wheel exactly as I had left it. Instead, I was looking at my normal desktop! I have no idea if it took 30 minutes to finally boot successfully, or two hours, all I know is that it’s working.
To be safe, I reboot from the OS X install CD and checked permissions and the disk. All is well, and this time the reboot finished in about 3 minutes. Despite this, I can’t help but think that 10.4.11 is slower than 10.4.10 was. The first launch of any application takes forever.
I guess I should consider myself lucky that I got my computer back up and running easily compared to other folks who have had trouble with this upgrade.
Next upgrade, I’m going to take the more careful route:
- Download combo updater (do not upgrade from the “Software Update…” menu).
- Boot from install CD and repair permissions/disk.
- Reboot in safe mode (hold down shift key).
- Install upgrade.
I know 99% of folks do a straight upgrade and everything is just fine and dandy. After being one of the poor 1% this round, I think being cautious will be worth it next time.
Amazing how much you can do in safe mode if you have to
Posted on November 15, 2007
Filed Under Macintosh | 3 Comments
So I’m down here in Alexandria, VA for our annual strategic staff retreat. I’m sitting in my room last night, enjoying the peace and quiet when I notice that Mac OS X 10.4.11 is out. I’ve never had a problem with an update before, so I think, “why not?” There were other software updates in the list, and without thinking, “should I really do this from a hotel room?” I start the download/install going. I leave the computer alone to do its thing.
An hour or so later, I notice that it’s done and I hit the button to restart. Grey Apple logo comes up with spinning progress bar. And it spins. And spins. And spins. And spins. Nearly 25 minutes later and still no blue screen with login window (and no disk activity), and I know something’s wrong. I force a shutdown (holding down the power button), knowing this won’t end well.
Try normal restart, and I get a black screen with some sort of mDNSresponder error in white. Not good. Not good at all. Force another shutdown and restart in safe mode (holding down the shift key). Eventually it starts up. Good. “About this Mac” shows I’m running 10.4.11. Good. Now I restart again, this time in verbose mode (command-v) to see exactly where things are going south in the boot. Not going to start blindly troubleshooting until I know what I’m dealing with. I see flashes of errors having to do with vmware (which I just started using last week and 10.4.11 had some fixes for), mDNSresponder and netboot. It then gets stuck in a loop of trying to do something with mDNSresponder and cycles down, trying again and again until it’s just sitting there occasionally spitting out an error message. Not good.
I have my Mac OS X install CD with me, and I know I can now boot from it and try running disk utility. But I’ve had the situation in the past where things got bad and trying to repair it did more harm than good.
The closest Apple Store is Pentagon City, Virginia. I made a Genius Bar reservation for tomorrow afternoon. I’m in a meeting all day today and can’t take it in or even call support. I have AppleCare. Let them look at what’s happening at startup and tell me what, if anything, I can do to save the situation.
And here’s the funny thing. I’m not freaking out. I’m not thrilled, of course. It has gotten to the point that my entire professional life (and most of my personal life) is on a server somewhere. The rest is safely backed up to external drives back in my home office. I logged into my Box.net account and uploaded about 30 MB of files that I’m concerned I can’t recreate easily. That’s it. All my email is sitting on an IMAP server. My calendar is in Google. I backed up my Address Book and keychain to Box.net. Word and Excel files that matter are either in Salesforce, Box, Google Docs or Basecamp.Worst case is that the Genius tells me that my System is hosed, and I have to start over. Time consuming for the weekend, but not terrible.
In the meantime, I can get online and use Safari well enough in safe mode with the hotel’s wired Ethernet (Airport is nonexistent…don’t know if that’s a safe mode thing or part of what’s messed up on my machine). I have a feeling it’s not a good idea to try Firefox in this state.
If all you had was a browser, an Internet connection and a few basic fonts, could you get your work done? I’m quite surprised that for me, I’m 90% functional this way.
Quick Mac OS X Tip: Drag & Drop Between Printer Queues
Posted on November 5, 2007
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I’ve been a Mac user for a long time, and I didn’t know you could do this…
Let’s say you have 50 documents queued up and it’s taking a really long time to print. You want to switch over to a different, faster printer. Or, as in my case, you want to switch to print via USB instead of Bluetooth.
You have all these documents sitting in the queue of the first printer, and you don’t want to have to reselect the originals to print again.
As long as you don’t have to change any printer settings, did you know that you can open the print queues of both printers and drag & drop files between them?
Works quite well.
If you’re going to scam through Verizon, do it on a weekend
Posted on November 3, 2007
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It started with what I thought were a few wrong numbers. Someone would call and say that they were returning my call, when I didn’t actually call them. I thought nothing of it.
Then I started getting more of these calls. Then they started leaving messages. I assumed that someone messed up and gave out my phone number as theirs accidentally.
Then it got serious. Turns out, these people weren’t writing down a phone number they heard in a message…they were using Caller ID to “return” the call.
Most callers had very heavy Indian accents so it was difficult to understand what they were calling about, or why they thought I called them. Finally, this morning it started making sense when I spoke with a woman whose English was good.
It seems that someone got ahold of a list of patients from a local doctor. Of course I won’t say the name of the doctor, but it appears that she has a large Indian clientele (and the doctor’s name is Indian-sounding herself) which explains the language barrier. The scammer has been calling the patients, claiming to be from the doctor’s office, and telling the victims that their file is incomplete and he’s asking them for additional personal information…like their birthdate and social security numbers. When he calls, the caller ID is my phone number.
I spoke to the doctor’s office this morning. They had just learned about this too, from patients who complained late yesterday. All of the people who work for the office are female, so there’s no chance anyone associated with the office made these phone calls.
I went through my caller ID history (I was rarely home when these calls came in) and listed 12 “return” phone calls from midday Tuesday until today. I didn’t realize just how many there were, since many didn’t leave messages when they heard my residential-sounding voicemail (I could tell by the Indian names). I doubt the scammer left my phone number in their message. They probably asked the person to call another number, and instead the victim just recalled the number to get me.
Now with enough information to know crimes are being committed, I called Verizon. Or I tried. There isn’t a single human being taking non-repair calls on a Saturday. I spoke to someone at Repair, who said…and I quote, “What do you want me to do about it? Your phone is working.” I called the police. They can’t do anything until the phone company gets involved. She said, “I can send an officer if you want, but they can’t file a report until the phone company is in.” It’s only my phone number…if an officer should make a visit, it’s to the doctor’s office that had their files stolen.
I even tried calling a local Verizon Wireless store, thinking they had a “behind the scenes” way to get through to the mothership on off hours. Nope, no such luck.
So there you go. If you want to commit a crime by hacking into a telephone, do it on Saturday. You’ll get off scot free until Monday morning when the business office opens.
In the meantime, I’m changing the voicemail on my phone to say that if you believe I’ve called you asking for any personal information, you’ve been the victim of a crime. It wasn’t me. Call the police. Just not Verizon if it’s a weekend.
If anyone knows a way to get Verizon to take this seriously before Monday morning, let me know, okay? Who knows how many victims this guy is piling up as I blog.
Update: Turns out that the doctor’s billing office was making the calls. So no crime committed. But we still have absolutely no explanation as to why my phone number is showing up on their caller ID.
