Author: lief

I wouldn’t be telling the whole truth if I told you I had never had any problems with my Mac.

Right now it sits in the 3rd hour of booting up tonight and I don’t know if I will ever get it fully started again.
I have a couple more things to try but no time right now.

I think it started when a friend and I loaded some non-standard software and database type stuff. No names here, I have a horse in that race too. But it ran really slow ever since that time and I am talkin slow slow, like it can be compared favorably to the flow rate of glass; REALLY slow. I haven’t been able to pin it down to a particular process or anything.

It seemed like it was swapping memory out a lot, but there was frequently quite a bit of idle memory. I am really not so sure it isn’t a hardware problem either.

Until I get that fixed you may expect a lot fewer pictures and some seriously slow response times on email.

At 0600 this AM I was awake and there were two strange men in our house and the first one was laughing about his 16 year old.
The first part, that I was awake, may sound odd enough but the latter bears explanation.
Let’s work backwards.

Last of all? Abbly slept right through it all.
Just before 0600 the second one was in the attic.
Before that the first one asked us all kinds of questions about candles and the dishwasher.
Before that he was in Abby’s bedroom while she slept.
When the first one came in the door I thought…man he is HUGE!
Just before that, approximately 0540 I was in the front yard in my slippers and shorts looking at the roof.
Angela smelled it too and she called the RFD.
Prior to that I woke up Angela to see if she smelled it too?
Just before that I was looking around the house in my skivvies smelling outlets and those infernal scented outlet thingies.
Prior to that, while checking on Abby, I smelled the distinct smell of smoke at around 0530.

So that explains the HUGE strangers in our house (man they were big) at 0600 this AM but we still don’t have a solid explanation for the very distinct smell in the house.
My explanation, the neighbor lit a cigarette on his way out the door and the sulphury smell of the struck match happened to be potent enough to waft into the window and blow into the back of the house where it lingered, without exit.

Angela, I believe, still thinks it was an electrical smell and I can’t completely dispute that. The Renton Fire Department guys are pretty nice.

I am welcoming myself back to the 21’st century of interconnectedness.

This is a bittersweet moment.

Despite two years of resistance Angela and I have entered the embodiment of the entaglement theory in business and the 1920’s-stock-market-of-the-digital-age. The quagmire known simply and innocently as wireless.
We wonder how we ever did without it while our wallets notice…you know we DID do without cell phones.

The convenience is undeniable.
The marketplace is unnavigable.
The time spent thumbing everyones names and phone numbers into a 1.34 inch keypad is unrecoverable…

BUT

…I have tasted the “sweet” in bittersweet, I have seen a thousand points of light at the end of the interconnected digital tunnel and I am texting w00t!

Introducing, for me at least, iSync. A native OS X application lying dormant on my Powerbook until I wondered aloud into Quicksilver “Can I upload all of the contacts I have laboriously and neurotically entered into my AddressBook straight into my phone?”

The answer was one discoverable bluetooth hookup away, and in something like seven and a half minutes I went from point A) finding iSync to point B) scrolling through my wireless phonebook of every contact I entered into Eleanor.

The kicker? Only those entries with phone numbers were uploaded.

I am not in marketing; I can’t sell my shares of BLIEF Inc. for $.10 per share more based on the volume of customers in my CRM database? I only get a thumbache scrolling through or deleting extraneous entries and Apple knows this. Not only that, but I discovered that little bit of functionality the first time I used the tool because iSync recognized the device as a phone and asked me a very simple question
“Would you like to only import those contacts with phone numbers?”

Yes please, and can I get a side of fries with that?

Since I know some of you may not be able to read this from beginning to end without pause, and I know you care, I have one more small thing…the blief GLOSSARY:

w00t! = “totally awesome” in online speak.
Powerbook = The brand name of the Apple laptop I use.
OS X = The name of the operating system that runs on my Powerbook.
iSync = An OS X application for synchronizing data between devices. w00t!
Quicksilver = a very w00t!y application on OS X that knows what I want to do before I finish typing the application name. In this case “is” got me “iSync”. w00t!w00t!
AddressBook = An OS X application for keeping track of all my peeps.
Eleanor = The name I gave to my Powerbook.
BLIEF Inc. = A “pigment” of my imagination, currently valued at $.yellow per share.
CRM = Customer Relationship Managment
Bluetooth = The name of a wireless data transfer protocol
UberGeek = Someone who gets unexplainably happy about a cell phone…that he said he didn’t want…and then he syncs it…and then he WRITES about it…ON HIS BLOG…taking longer to do THAT than it did to ship HelloMoto to his house…and says w00t! a lot while he is doing it!

Ahhhh, now I feel better.
w00t!

I heard a story on NPR the other day and I looked up the product that was the subject of the story.

It is called EcoCreto (A Spanish speaking group invented the stuff hence the “creto” which would be “crete” in English or EcoCrete) and it is pervious concrete.

Pervious: Water runs right through it and yet the stuff is as hard as regular concrete. Who knows if these guys will get run out of town a la Tucker and his sweet cars but this invention certainly has the capacity to change the world as we know it.

EcoCreto, pervious concrete.

I’m a small bottle brush
I am nerve tissue
Open the root canal
We have an issue