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.

I saw a group dynamic interaction that amused and puzzled me this morning, which I felt like sharing.

I joined some people for a "coffee klatch" this morning; the hostess is someone I know from about a year ago and had fallen out of touch with, so I decided to show up and catch up. As is often the case with these events, a number of the attendees showed up with their laptops, taking advantage of the coffeeshop's free wifi in the midst of conversations and chit-chat.

A new person came in, and I jokingly said, "Where's your laptop? You didn't get the memo to bring yours?" Apparently, this was the wrong joke to make. She immediately frowned and went into a minor rant about how rude it was that people brought laptops to these events, and they kill conversation, and she just didn't understand what people were thinking, being so inconsiderate!

Oookay, so I pushed a button there. Thankfully, I hadn't brought my laptop with me today, so in her eyes I wasn't included as "one of them" (though I so very much am). I stepped away for a bit to get some coffee and to ponder my reaction and a reasonable response. My first thought was, "Hmm, so bringing a laptop to a klatch is rude, but immediately joining a group and complaining about how rude everyone else is, that's fine. Alrighty then."

My other observation was that I hadn't noticed the laptops stifling conversation. It's not like people were head-down clacking at the keyboard ignoring the group. Instead they were bringing up photos of things they wanted to show, looking up articles on wikipedia to share information about a particular topic being discussed, looking up the event calendar to tell people about upcoming gatherings. To me, the computers felt like definite accessories to the conversation, not impediments.

Pondering all this, I got my coffee and returned to the table... to find the entire group in conversation... except for the ranter... who was quietly ignoring the group while she read her newspaper. I considered trying to point out the obvious, and decided to let it go.

Monday, a student flagged me down for some help with exponential functions. "They give me two points that the function passes through, and they want me to give the equation of the function." Using my typical Socratic TutorFu I asked, "Okay, what do you want to try?" "Well, we've got two points, so let's try to find the slope between them." I'm a little stumped. Is this a new technique I don't know? "Umm, okay. Can you explain why?" She looks at me blankly. "Because that's what we always did for the equations for lines...?"


In related news, I was musing about exponential functions. The generic form is:

   Q=ab^t

First, what's up with Q and t? x and y are old school?
Then I found myself thinking about the formula for compound interest, at which point I wondered why the generic form of the exponential doesn't include a coefficient for the exponent, like so:

   Q=ab^kt

Thankfully, I thought about it for a minute rather than just asking another tutor. Oh, right. That can be modified to:...

   Q=a(b^k)^t

... at which point b^k can be reduced to a single term. Not quite a "duh" moment, but I'm glad I figured it out myself.


But here's a topic I'm not doing so well with. Fairly early in algebra, around the time kids are learning to graph lines, math texts start talking about functions. They expect students to know what a function is, and to know about the vertical line test. They classify variables as "input variables" and "output variables", and that one input can't have more than one output (which is just another way of stating the vertical line test).
I can't help but wonder, who cares?!
Not in the "Who cares what X is?!" sense, but why is this topic so important? Why is this distinction so critical at this stage of algebra education?
Here are two equations:
   y=x²      x=y²
Both can be manipulated algebraically in the exact same fashion. You can solve either of them for y and for x. You can graph both of them. But one is a function and the other isn't. And I fail to see why that's critically important. Am I missing something big here?

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.

I just noticed the advertising on this cup from McDonalds. In case you can't make it out, it says,

open 'til midnight or later
at participating McDonalds

Parsing this for semantic value, what have we learned? Some McDonalds are open until midnight. And some are open later. And some are open not that late. Which covers all possibilities. Somehow, I don't think I needed this bit of cup advertising to know this.

Last night, I took a girl out to hear a lecture about e coli; what it is, how it spreads, what it can do to you, how to minimize the risks. Do I know how to show a girl a good time, or what?

For the first time in ages, I bought an album off the iTunes Music Store this morning!

I stopped using the iTMS entirely several years ago. The store was originally unveiled back in April 2003, and I was a big fan at first. I didn't like swallowing the digital-rights management embedded in all purchased tunes, but Apple had negotiated fairly liberal terms from the music labels and I didn't find any of the restrictions particularly onerous. But in April 2004, Apple changed the terms of their DRM. The changes were not burdensome; for instance, purchased music in a playlist could be burned to a CD only 7 times (down from 10 previously). The content of the change didn't bother me at all. But the implication, that Apple could change the terms of the purchase at any time, was deeply disturbing to me. And so I left the store behind. I've purchased a few CDs since then, mostly at concerts, but otherwise my music buying dropped tremendously.

Fast forward to today. Oh frabjous day, iTunes 7.2 has been released, providing support for high-quality DRM-free music from the EMI label. And I'm fairly confident this is merely the leading edge of a wave that will eventually include all of the major record labels. "They are grapes in the path of the steamroller of progress."

Finally, I can purchase music from the iTMS again, secure in the knowledge that Apple cannot mandate a change in the terms after the fact.

Hoo-rah! So, I've bought one album and one single this morning, and would have purchased more, except that the iTMS seems to be slowed to a crawl, no doubt from all the extra traffic.

Footnote for abrichar: This is not a paid endorsement. :-)
Footnote for sarahlibelle: The album was KT Tunstall's "Eye to the Telescope". Further proof that I'm an old man.

After reading some of the horror stories on the net, I had great trepidation about ordering new FIOS service through Verizon. But, the price/bandwidth ratio were too sweet to ignore, so I took a big breath and placed the order.

Installation happened today. It took a while (three and a half hours), but the installer was a champ. He was happy to install the "outside" box in my attic, rather than hanging it off the outside of the house. The rest of the goodies were installed in my utility room downstairs. Once he had everything hooked up, I rushed to test the speed of the line.

Yeah, bay-bee! It's early yet, but so far I give the experience two thumbs up.

Oh yeah, and Happy 4/20!