SonicChicken blog

Over on Call Me Fishmeal, Wil Shipley is linking to a speech on economics, democracy, media and the environment. It’s a broad topic, and the transcript of the speech is a relatively long read, but it’s well worth the effort. Wil is right: Whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat, who can disagree with this stuff? Who wants their children to have birth defects, to suffer asthma, to live on a moonscape?

There isn’t really much else to write on the issue other than, “Yeah, what he said!” So save your reading effort for the speech.

It’s that introspective time of year when people start thinking about their shortcomings and what they might do about them, in the form of New Year’s Resolutions. I can already envision the post-holiday crowds forming at health clubs everywhere!

I consider myself a pretty well-adjusted person, but there are obviously things I should do, but don’t (and vice versa). In fact I’m sure that I could easily come up with a dozen changes I would like to make in my life. This raises a question: do I try to make all of these changes beginning on 1 January 2006, or should I prioritize them and pick just one for 2006? I’ve been given good advice on attempting massive changes in habits — it doesn’t happen without concomitant motivation, e.g. your life hangs in the balance. I don’t have such a threat hovering over me, so the shotgun approach is out.

But instead of attempting one Resolution for 2006, potentially failing to stick to it, and maybe even picking up another bad habit this coming year, I thought of another possible approach: How about a monthly resolution? I’ve heard that if one can willfully change their behavior for a full month, the new behavior becomes habitual, i.e. something that doesn’t require effort to maintain. If I adopted this approach, I’d have 12 chances for self-improvement in 2006. Heck, if even one of these things “stuck” I’d be doing better than most people with respect to New Year’s Resolutions! But being realistic, I know that I’m likely to fail at least as often as I succeed in this endeavor, so I’m not going to queue up a new resolution for every month. Instead, I’ll allow for several “do-overs” starting about April (or later, on the off-chance that I’m successful in January and February).

What sort of resolutions would be good candidates? Well, it seems to me that they should be daily (or more frequent) tasks, particularly things that are important to me — my family and my health are the first general things that come to my mind. Some possible specifics might be:

• Ensuring the chores are done every day (both the kids’ and our own)
• Bicycling daily (either commuting or recreational)
• Getting my “5/day” veggies and fruits
• Flossing every day (here I am married to a dental hygienist, and I only floss once or twice per week, tsk tsk)

A dozen monthly resolutions seem like a better approach to self-improvement than the typical New Year’s Resolution. I’ll pick something easy for January and see if I can stick with it throughout the month. For February I could take the next easiest task, and so on. Hmm, if I kept at it for a few months perhaps I would get into the habit of changing my habits.

Wow, my family ended up with nine new games on our shelf this Christmas! As far as I know, all of these were picked up at Viking Hobby, so they did pretty well by us this season.

Any guesses as to what we’ll be doing in our spare time for the next few months?

Woo hoo! SantaDHL came by yesterday and I got my PowerBook G4 back from Apple! In fact, I’m posting from it right now. I’m a bit busy preparing for Christmas to spend much time on recovering all my files, settings, etc., but at least I’ve managed to set up my login account and wireless network.

I’ll probably get down to serious recovery efforts on Dec 27–We’re going to my parents’ house for Christmas Eve, Christmas Day is obviously booked, and “Boxing Day” (Dec 26) we’re going to Kevin’s house for a game of Civilization.

It’s been over a month since I wrote anything about the boot failure issues on my PowerBook. It hasn’t been for lack of material; rather, no single issue has warranted a post of its own. But looking back, I now have a month of experiences (mostly bad) to relate.

DiskWarrior wasn’t able to recover my disk. I tried DataRescue, and it seemed to work. (More details below.) I was hoping to wait until I verified DataRescue’s performance before I wrote about it, but I haven’t been able to restore my data yet. Why? Well…

We purchased 3-year warranties when we bought our PowerBooks. Some time during the first year, you have to fill out the AppleCare warranty registration. I did this, but I made a mistake on the paperwork. They claim to have notified me of this, and I have to give them the benefit of the doubt. (My desk is buried under about 3 feet of crap, which could easily be hiding the notification letter.) So now, since my PowerBook died after the first year, I had to jump through several hoops to get my additional two-year warranty activated. This took about 1.5 weeks to get straightened out.

While I was waiting for my AppleCare warranty paperwork, I stopped by my local Apple store. I wanted to find out if I could keep my busted disk drive for a few days after they gave me a replacement drive, in order to attempt recovery of the drive’s data. The person I spoke with at the retail counter assured that this was possible. When I finally got my warranty authorization, I took my laptop to the GeniusBar. They ran some diagnostics to verify the disk failure and began filling out a work authorization when I asked about keeping my old disk. Now I was told that there was no way I could keep my old disk. Grrrr! So I took my baby home for one final data recovery session. (Lesson learned: Never ask warranty questions at the retail counter! Always head to the Genius Bar for this sort of thing.)

By now, it’s early December. My PowerBook G4 has been dead for over two months! I had received the copy of DataRescue II that I ordered, so I hooked up a FireWire drive and booted DR2. (The DiskWarrior CD was still in the drive. In order to eject the CD-ROM, I had to hold down the mouse button while powering up the laptop.) DR2 seemed to work great. It took several hours to examine the disk, but it beat the pants off DiskWarrior! Since I was going to permanently lose the disk, I ran several recovery passes using nearly every trick that DR2 provided, saving both the file/directory structure as well as “content-based recovery” which is able to recognize JPEG, MP3, PNG, et cetera, files based on their content. When the AppleStore opened the next morning, I was able to make an appointment at the GeniusBar using the Concierge service. (Requires Flash.) They didn’t have a replacement disk available at the store, so they suggested sending it in for “depot repair” since it would probably take a day or two longer for them to order a replacement disk and perform the repair at the store.

On December 4, I finally got my laptop in for repair. That was a Sunday, so it should have been shipped out on Monday. The “repair” is merely replacing the hard drive, which ought to take under an hour. Then the unit was going to be shipped back to me. This should have been finished in about a week, right? Wrong! Problem number 1: some chowderhead at the depot accused me (via a customer service person) of installing a non-Apple hard drive, so my warranty was void. I assured the CS rep that I hadn’t opened the case, so she asked the repair tech to send her photos of the “unauthorized” drive. A day later, I got another call from the CS rep telling me that the Apple sticker was clearly visible in the photo so she graciously reinstated my warranty and authorized the repair. (There went at least two days.) I was told to expect my system back early the following week (12-14 December). Well, it didn’t arrive last Monday, and I was meeting with a vendor all day Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. On Friday morning, (16 Dec 2005), I still hadn’t seen my baby so I called Apple. It turns out that they had been sitting on my repair because they didn’t have the exact same part in stock, and they won’t do anything (beyond ordering the part) until two weeks have passed! I guess last Friday was close enough to the 2-week limit that they initiated a “thorough inventory check” to see if there are any identical hard drives stashed away somewhere. They will supposedly wait two business days for a response on this, before they allow substitution by an upgraded part. So my PowerBook should be repaired tomorrow and shipped back to me, but the PowerBook G4 Support page still shows “On hold - Part on order” as the current status.

Once I actually receive my laptop, I’ll finally get to see how well Data Rescue performed. More to come…