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thewayneAnother "bomb cyclone" hit in Colorado, and we once again were on the fringe. Warnings of 75 MPH winds, woohoo. Russet went down to get a haircut and to attend a retirement board meeting - she's got 22 years in at the observatory and decided it was time to get some info. So I'm sitting up here with the dogs, listening to limbs of various sizes getting blown off trees and hitting our metal roof, both poodles huddled around me.
4:15 the power goes out.
4:16 I begin packing up my nebulizer stuff for two days away from the house - we were without power for 36 hours last time.
About 90 minutes later, Russet finished with her meeting. We decided I'd pack clothes, dogs, etc. and meet her down at Applebee's for dinner and we'd figure out what we were doing from there.
Dinner had a fascinating twist. I had a 6 ounce sirloin - they did a good job cooking it medium. That is, 75% of it. The remainder was VERY under-done. Normally the griddles they cook on have different temperature zones, all we can figure is when they flipped the steak, part of it slid into a colder zone and came out under-done.
Kinda funny.
ANYWAY, after we finished malingering for as long as we thought we could reasonably get away with, we hit the grocery store for a few things and headed home. We were slightly optimistic that power was back up as my WeatherBug app was reporting from the high school - a good sign. And lo - our house was illuminated when we arrived! Took a few trips to haul everything in since the dogs aren't very useful as pack animals (must look for saddlebags on Amazon), but eventually everything was in. Watched an episode of Midsomer Murders and then I had to fix my iMac.
Not long before the power went out, I blew up my iMac.
I've been running low on disk space for far too long now. Low as in below 200 gig on a 3 TB system. Then I did a little photo editing and built a panorama of twenty images. That's not what blew up my computer - I made the mistake of not flattening the image before cropping it. With those twenty layers, the image size was 1.3 gig! Far too big for my system, once flattened it was down to something like 250 meg. But since I didn't flatten it, it absolutely killed all system memory.
I had to force quit all apps, but that wasn't enough. I tried deleting files, and then I get this lovely error that I can't delete files because I don't have enough disk space to delete files! Now, for eternity Macs have always had a trash can where deleted files go, but the operating system was giving me a warning that the files would be directly deleted and would not go to the trash can. I was fine with that, but they weren't deleting!
Finally I did some digging around and it said to boot to safe mode, and that would flush some caches and free space. So I did. It did not seem to release any space. And I still couldn't delete any files! I tried booting into a maintenance mode, and that's when my computer did the boot dance of death.
So I gave up, at least temporarily, cut up a Jazz apple (very yummy variety!), some cheddar sharp enogh to bite back, and went into the living room to watch James May build a 1:1 model replica of a Spitfire fighter plane.
And then the power went out.
[cue sound of audio being fast-forwarded to indicate passage of time]
Just got my iMac booted! I was able to boot in to terminal mode, which isn't quite enough to work on the hard drive. Then you have to mount the drive for read/write access: by default it boots as read-only. THEN I was able to delete some stuff, and I now have 254 gig disk space free!
Everything seems fine now, Photoshop is not complaining, I was able to build the pano of 20 images with no problems - I remembered to flatten it this time before doing any manipulation! And it's a monster: the final JPEG is 84 meg! I'm planning on posting it tomorrow - it's interesting....
At least we're no longer weather refugees - for now. Here's to hoping no more bomb cyclones any time soon!
4:15 the power goes out.
4:16 I begin packing up my nebulizer stuff for two days away from the house - we were without power for 36 hours last time.
About 90 minutes later, Russet finished with her meeting. We decided I'd pack clothes, dogs, etc. and meet her down at Applebee's for dinner and we'd figure out what we were doing from there.
Dinner had a fascinating twist. I had a 6 ounce sirloin - they did a good job cooking it medium. That is, 75% of it. The remainder was VERY under-done. Normally the griddles they cook on have different temperature zones, all we can figure is when they flipped the steak, part of it slid into a colder zone and came out under-done.
Kinda funny.
ANYWAY, after we finished malingering for as long as we thought we could reasonably get away with, we hit the grocery store for a few things and headed home. We were slightly optimistic that power was back up as my WeatherBug app was reporting from the high school - a good sign. And lo - our house was illuminated when we arrived! Took a few trips to haul everything in since the dogs aren't very useful as pack animals (must look for saddlebags on Amazon), but eventually everything was in. Watched an episode of Midsomer Murders and then I had to fix my iMac.
Not long before the power went out, I blew up my iMac.
I've been running low on disk space for far too long now. Low as in below 200 gig on a 3 TB system. Then I did a little photo editing and built a panorama of twenty images. That's not what blew up my computer - I made the mistake of not flattening the image before cropping it. With those twenty layers, the image size was 1.3 gig! Far too big for my system, once flattened it was down to something like 250 meg. But since I didn't flatten it, it absolutely killed all system memory.
I had to force quit all apps, but that wasn't enough. I tried deleting files, and then I get this lovely error that I can't delete files because I don't have enough disk space to delete files! Now, for eternity Macs have always had a trash can where deleted files go, but the operating system was giving me a warning that the files would be directly deleted and would not go to the trash can. I was fine with that, but they weren't deleting!
Finally I did some digging around and it said to boot to safe mode, and that would flush some caches and free space. So I did. It did not seem to release any space. And I still couldn't delete any files! I tried booting into a maintenance mode, and that's when my computer did the boot dance of death.
So I gave up, at least temporarily, cut up a Jazz apple (very yummy variety!), some cheddar sharp enogh to bite back, and went into the living room to watch James May build a 1:1 model replica of a Spitfire fighter plane.
And then the power went out.
[cue sound of audio being fast-forwarded to indicate passage of time]
Just got my iMac booted! I was able to boot in to terminal mode, which isn't quite enough to work on the hard drive. Then you have to mount the drive for read/write access: by default it boots as read-only. THEN I was able to delete some stuff, and I now have 254 gig disk space free!
Everything seems fine now, Photoshop is not complaining, I was able to build the pano of 20 images with no problems - I remembered to flatten it this time before doing any manipulation! And it's a monster: the final JPEG is 84 meg! I'm planning on posting it tomorrow - it's interesting....
At least we're no longer weather refugees - for now. Here's to hoping no more bomb cyclones any time soon!
