All at once, Summer is over in a definitive fashion. I enjoyed a bit of sun this weekend during a short little bicycle ride on Sunday and lounging in a park afterwards. But the wind has picked up, clouds have gathered and this morning it was so cold I went around the house making sure windows were closed. I'm pretty happy about how I spent the season. There was just a ridiculous amount of biking around, wringing out every drop of fun I could manage.

On the work front… there's very little work front left. My last day is Thursday of this week. All the company-owned equipment has already been returned and I'm merely waiting for the paperwork to arrive. It was a good ride and I'm sure I will miss it considerably. But I'm looking forward to what comes next.

And speaking of next, classes started yesterday. The one waitlist class was successfully added, all my forms were turned in and I don't feel quite so lost wandering around campus now. Two of the classes should be readily manageable, more review than anything else. But one of the classes should be more of a challenge. I'm realizing it has been *cough* over 20 years since I've taken a math class! I'm not even sure I know how to take a math class any more. Does one take notes? What do the notes say? "Carry the seven." "It's spelled 'sin', but not like the fun kind; it's pronounced 'sign'." "Base 8 is just like base 10… if you're missing two fingers."

Meanwhile at the other campus, tutoring has started for the Fall term, and it is already crazy busy. I arrived early on the first day, and while waiting for the tutoring center to be unlocked, I had students asking me to help them with problems in the hallway, squatting on the floor. The center is filled to overflowing and I spend the entire shift going from question to question without break. Frankly, I prefer that to sitting idle, but still… it's an unmistakable increase in traffic from last year. I wonder if it will stay like this all term? And I'm amused to note I'm pretty comfortable tutoring one of the classes I'm taking this term... and the class after it. But that could easily change as the term progresses and the classes move into more challenging material.

Getting from one campus to the next is going to be a challenge. MHCC is far enough east that it's a hell of a hike just to get to the last MAX station. If the weather is passable, I can bike it easily enough. But in foul weather, I'll have to drive to one of the MAX stations and take the Green line from there. I've got just enough time to make that work (at the cost of any possible lunch), but it's a bigger hassle than I might like. I'm investigating changing around my tutoring schedule to make this all rather easier.

No particular story to tell today, just a few random bits floating through my brain this morning, chit-chat over the morning coffee.

Goodness, this has felt like an autumnal weekend! A serious dose of rain and cooler temps. And I've been noticing the first few drift piles of leaves littering the curbs and driveways. Fall isn't here yet, but it's in the post. Walking upstairs this morning to make the coffee, the floor was cold in a way that felt distinctly familiar. Best make the most of what little remains of Summer.

And speaking of which... a friend of a friend died Sunday morning. She was very recently diagnosed with stage IV cancer, and still I find myself stunned by how swiftly it progressed. As if that's the sort of thing that should be called progress. After having recently endured a bunch of family deaths that hit pretty close to home (grandfather, uncle, mother, MJ, grandmother, in that order), this is the first death in a while that I've been able to watch with some distance and perspective. It's not the most original thought, but I find myself wondering how much of our grieving is related to a deep emotional sense that our day will come too. And then Melody reminded me that some amount of it is simply lost history. Someone dies and you realize that was the last person who could have reminded you of lost stories, could have explained small mysteries, could have filled in specific holes in your life story. I want to ask Mom how to do the perfect barbecue pork shoulder, or ask my grandfather about growing up on a farm and fighting in WWII. Those stories are gone now, forever and ever.

Death, in its democratic fashion, votes for each of us, eventually. So there's your theme, Summer and life, make the most of however many days we might have left.

I did my second ride through the SW hills yesterday, about 30 miles., on a route that went down to Lake Oswego, circled the lake, then back up to Stumptown. I felt reasonably strong and could have gone faster than the collective group speed, but I won't pretend the hills didn't kick my ass. The elevation profile for the ride looked like an EKG. And while 20 miles feels like a fun night of lazy riding, 30 miles definitely feels more serious. At the very least, it's the threshold where I want real padded biking shorts for my delicate bum. I'm still trying to top 1000 miles for the year. I know some of the people reading this will scoff at that number, and some will be impressed. It's just a number; at the end of the day, we're only competing with ourselves.

Still expecting to be laid off from the Big Fruit in two weeks. I've been accepted into PSU for the Fall and I'm still awaiting word on my transfer credits and how much distance might be between me and a math degree. I've thrown my name in the ring to continue tutoring at MHCC this fall, but depending on schedule that may not work. Or maybe I'll look into tutoring at PSU. Of course, I've also got my resume into a couple of tech recruiters in the area, and if something interesting came up I might get distracted by a sparkly shiny new job/project. But with this economy, I wouldn't count on it. Ahh well, I refuse to get stressed over it. New adventures, one way or another.

A couple of weeks ago, my big 1TB external hard drive died an ignoble death. I tried every trick I knew to recover it, with no success. I even took it to a local repair site to let them try their voodoo; no dice. Thankfully, some parts of the drive were reliably backed up, including all of my photos. *whew* However, I lost my entire music collection. *groan*

What have I learned from this?

• Don't be an idiot; backup yer stuff. In a stroke of good luck, I acquired an Apple Time Capsule a couple of months ago and have been using it for backups. Quelle suprise, it does just what it claims to do, and does it really well. Three cheers for technology that "just works"!



• The drive that died was a Western Digital My Book hard drive. Notice how big and chunky that case looks? If you open it up, you'll find out there are two 500GB hard drives inside, plugged into a little circuit board that stripes the drives together a 1TB RAID. This works, but it has a pretty serious implication; with a striped RAID data is scattered across both drives. Which means that if one drive in the RAID dies, you've essentially lost access to the data in the entire RAID. So a striped RAID basically has double the odds of a catastrophic failure compared to a traditional single hard drive. Yikes! Had I been thinking clearly, I never would have bought this drive in the first place.



• I've purchased a modest amount of digital music online from the Amazon MP3 store. I respect the fact that their music library is DRM-free, and encoded at a high bit-rate. But I was really sad to read this in their FAQ: "We are currently unable to replace any purchased files that you delete or lose due to a system or disk error." That tears it; I will no longer buy music that way. It's back to CDs for me.

Thankfully, I've been able to retrieve about 2/3rds of my music collection from raiding a friend's music library (not pirating; just retrieving copies of stuff I own and lost on the dead drive), and I recovered a little more from what tiny percentage of my music was on my little 8GB iPhone. Now I've pulled eight (8!!) boxes of CDs from the attic and am selectively re-ripping stuff to fill in the holes in my collection.

• Keep your CDs; don't sell them to the used CD stores unless you really don't like them. You'll never know when you might need that media again.

I'll conclude this little blog post with a relevant bible verse (you didn't know I had it in me, didja?):
To write the same things again is no trouble to me, and it is a safeguard for you.
- The Apostle Paul, Phil 3:1, advocating backups.

A friend had some tech support woes this morning, and I tried to help. Despite my best efforts, I couldn't solve the problem either, and so we had to haul the computer off to the local Apple Store for a visit to the Genius Bar.

The tech wrestled with the problem briefly before he also admitted defeat. The computer had to be left overnight to be taken apart and the optical drive replaced. As the tech was checking in the computer, he asked, "What's the password on this user account?"

She muttered discretely, "mumble, mumble".

"What's that?"

This time she said it with studied nonchalance, "cockring".

To his credit, the tech accepted it without blinking. :-)

Late last fall, I got a brand new Mac Book Pro. It was my first Intel machine, and a newer industrial design, and wicked fast and I was quite happy with it. For a while.

Sometime in the new year, it started exhibiting problems. First, there was random bitshit on the screen, sporadic redraw problems, pixel smearing. Sometimes it was really minor and subtle, sometimes it was pretty dramatic. But always, I could force a window redraw and it was fixed. The second problem was much more serious. On occasion, with no rhyme or reason I could discern, the UI layer would lock up tight. I could still move the cursor, but otherwise the graphics layer just stopped responding. I could SSH into the computer, kill apps, launch apps, but nothing would update on the screen. The only way to "recover" was a hard restart. Gack!

I was pretty convinced both problems were due to a hardware failure with the graphics board. But my laptop is absolutely essential to my work, and it's not like I could bear to send the computer into repair for a couple of weeks. And really, if the worst that happened was that I had to reboot every once in a while, I could stand that. Right?

But it gradually got worse. Sometimes the UI-lockups would happen as infrequently as every three days, but sometimes I would have several happen times in a half hour, one right after the other. Two weeks ago, it finally got bad enough that I snapped. I ordered a brand spankin' new, top of the line Mac Book Pro. The idea was to get it before I made my trip to the mothership in CA the following week.

Of course, the laptop got delivered to PDX on the exact same day I landed in CA. Sigh. I spent all week twitching with anticipation at the shiny new toy waiting for me at home. Then, the problem got even worse. I was working late one night, trying to produce screen shots for a proposed HI design for a pair of presentations the next day. Running Xcode, Interface Builder and Photoshop, and having the computer lock up on me multiple times in a row. A chore that I should have been able to wrap up in a couple of evening hours took me until about 2 am.

Later that week, I tried to make a workout routine from the problem. I started one morning, doing a single pushup at the first seizure. The next one, I did two pushups. And so on. (What do you call a factorial, only done with addition? My GoogleFu is failing me.) Before noon, I had done 45 pushups and was about to snap. Finally, a sainted co-worker loaned me a tower box. I was able to carefully move my Data partition and home dir to an external hard drive and connected that to the tower box to get some work done for the remaining day in the office. After a couple of hours of using it, I realized I was still flinching with every action I took. "Is this gonna lock up the computer? Or this? Can I afford to close this window?" It's as if I had PTSD because of an accursed laptop possessed by daemon spawn. Every time I saw a rainbow cursor, my sphincter would clench and I'd hold my breath.

Finally, I'm home again, with all my data safely transferred to the shiny new Mac Book Pro. It is running just like a new computer should, with a battery that seemingly lasts forever, a display that is blindingly bright, and most importantly, without any crashes whatsoever.

Next week I'll wipe the hard drive on the EvilLaptop and take it in for service. Once it is back and proven to be working well, I suppose it'll be time to eBay it.

Oh yeah, and my pecs still have some lingering soreness from the pushups. Time for me to restore those (in moderation) to my morning routine.