Always strive to learn something useful. --Sophocles

Another "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!

I now have a working laptop! I took both to the compute repair guy on the base after lunch today, and he transplanted the motherboard, battery, hard drive, and did some other internal stuff, in about 3 hours! Amazing what you can do when you know what you're doing and have some experience at it. It would probably have taken me double that, I would have lost screws, forgotten to connect something, and wanted to go on a stabbing spree after I was done.

And he did it for $100!

In my book, that's a good deal. A very good exchange of my dollars for his time.

Everything appears 100%. I've used it for about half an hour tonight playing a little World of Warcraft (some class hall stuff and a few pet battles), and WoW will stress your computer: no problems. I wish he'd left "my" HD in "my" chassis, but no big deal. Probably next month I'll be replacing it with a solid state drive, then doing a Time Machine restore, so I can wait and live without Photoshop on a laptop for a bit. Wireless is obviously working fine, and the battery is charging.

And that's another thing that went bad. The battery that I had in "my" chassis was new, and the guy said that it wasn't taking a charge! So apparently either the failed power manager of my old motherboard fried it, or I was mistaken and my new battery that I bought last year or the year before was in my wife's chassis. I'll take the bottom off the all-but-dead laptop over the weekend and check. I'll check with iFixit and see if there's any warranty on it and when I bought it, it'd be nice if I could get it replaced. Right now, the battery is reporting 99% charge, and I just unplugged it. We'll see how long it thinks it's good for general use under one full charge. It's reporting 2:15 time remaining, which seems about right, so I guess it'll wait until this weekend for me to take apart the other laptop to see what's inside.

Ye gods and little fishes.

I was removing needles from my weekly infusion and had moved my laptop so that it was open 90 degrees and tucked next to the coffee table. Then the dogs ignited because of a horde of deer wandering the neighborhood.

And this is what happened.



(click to embiggen)

One of the function keys is still missing. At least they didn't break the LCD, and at least I have the time to deal with it tonight.

The problem is that the 'spring' is two nylon parts that provide the resistance, and I don't think they can be put back together once they're torn apart. So I'll be spending a good 30-60 minutes swapping the HD and battery back in to my original laptop to get it going again. My HD has been living in my wife's laptop's body for many months, it's not a bad thing that it's going back in to mine as my screen hinge is in much better shape. I'm VERY thankful that my wife and I both had 2011 MacBook Pro's! 2012 was the last year that you could work on them yourself, the next model year was when they started gluing in everything.

*sigh*

EDIT: took maybe half an hour. Oh: that's three dogs for about 150 lbs: two standard poodles and a blue tick hound. Fortunately I had the three-bladed screw driver as I'd put a new battery in my wife's laptop last year, Apple loves weird screw drivers. I think everything else on a MacBook Pro is a standard Philips #0. I remembered to de-authorize iTunes on the damaged one before I was fully in to the swap, so that was good. And re-authorizing iCloud wasn't as bad as I expected. But what's weird is it comes up on my iPhone (and iPad and iPad (I found a 32 gig iPad 4th gen at a pawn shop last week for $100!)) saying "A computer near Phoenix, AZ is trying to authenticate." That's fine and dandy, but I'm 500 miles from Phoenix! If it said 'near El Paso, TX', that would only be off by 100 miles.

So everything seems OK, and the concentration required to uninstall and reinstall two batteries and two hard drives calmed me right back down.

I recently had the following conversation with my brother.

Him: Can your Mac do RAID?
Me: The operating system can, but I only have one drive so I can't.
Him: Do you know anything about RAID?
Me: (thinking about the various servers that I've set up and maintained over the years) Yes.
Him: I know you don't know much about Windows 7, do you know anything about it's RAID?
Me: Yes.
Him: I'm getting an error message about RAID on my system.
Me: What does it say?
Him: I don't know.
Me: Do you have RAID configured in his system? (I was pretty sure he had)
Him: Yes. What does the message mean?
Me: It could mean one of your drives has failed. (That got his attention!)
Him: How do I find out?
Me: Read the message, it should have a number and some more information.

I feel like someone walked up to me on the street and said “I received a letter at home, what does it say?”

I don't know how he got RAID set up on his system, he either blundered through it or a friend did it. If you're going to do RAID on a home system, you really should know something about how to look up error messages.

Either load it from here or do a Windows Update and update your system in general.

http://www.microsoft.com/athome/security/update/bulletins/200601_WMF.mspx