Wrong. Just wrong

Ok, I'm warped. But I like this banned 7-up commercial (so they say).

What's your sign?

iPhone update - iBrick yet again

Ok - I'm never updating my iPhone again. This sux - I finally get around to updating it and I get an error "The iPhone ...could not be updated. An unknown error occurred (1602)". It's a known iBrick party. WTF? I don't remember if that was the same error I got for 1.1.1.

This is pretty stupid. Both times I've updated the software it has failed and this phone has not been hacked. I learned a lesson, though - sync the phone first (that is, say 'No friggin way' to the update message when the iPhone is connected) and do a normal sync. Then go back and update the software if that's what you want to do. I've lost all the data on my phone since the sync yesterday. That means the notes and numbers, etc that I got from visiting family yesterday for Thanksgiving are all lost. Probably all the pictures too - though iPhoto may have gotten them first. Nice.

Oh, and restoring a few gig's of data? Ya - settle in. It takes a good while... I figure the battery will be mostly charged up by the time it's done, though.

Charging an iPod with an Onion?

I've not gotten around to hacking my iPhone. But I regularly find myself out and about with an uncharged iPhone. Here's new twist on an old school science project with practical value - hey, could this also reduce out dependency on foreign oil? I can see it now - the price of onions have skyrocketed on the Chicago commodities exchange with the announcement that Onions have solved the worlds energy crisis. (Sounds like an Onion article).

Aww - they're buddies

This mouse has the right type of friends. A monsoon brought together two unlikely friends.

Linguistic Profile

I love the 10% Dixie and 10% Yankee part. Sounds like inner turmoil to me...

Your Linguistic Profile:

60% General American English 15% Upper Midwestern 10% Dixie 10% Yankee 0% Midwestern

What Kind of American English Do You Speak?

Not sure about this one though...

Your Inner European is Italian!

Passionate and colorful. You show the world what culture really is.

Who's Your Inner European?

New Starbucks!

I've sort of accepted that Cumming is out in the sticks - that may be changing. Over the past year we've seen a rather large swath of trees clearcut near exit 13 & 400, and a lot of construction activity. I had heard that a nice shopping area was coming in complete with new restaurants. To my delight there is a new, very large Starbucks among the shops, and it has a drive-through! The nice thing is that this is on my side of 400 and right along the path I take to get from my house to 400. Sweet!

The front area has lots of warm-weather outside seating.


One of the nice "nooks". There are actually 4 different inside seating area - some with tables some in nice chairs. Good hanging out place. They say it's the 2nd largest Starbucks in Georgia.

Leopard dislikes

Yes sports fans, Apple is not perfect after all :)

Overall I like the updates to the new Mac OS. Apple just won't give up, however, on their .Mac failed science experience. I don't like how there are icons in my top status bar and in the finder left nav bar for .Mac: iDisk - bah. I understand what they are trying to do but seriously wish it was not visible. Unfortunately, I've not found a way of hiding it altogether, so I am constantly presented with Apple's plea for me to iWeb my iMac. Why pay $99 to get what I get free from, say, Google?

I also detest the new login screen. It's an awful new age-ish aurora sorta space looking deal. The usually stylish Apple took a turn that at least to me isn't all that tasteful with this whole space theme. Turns out, it's easy to change with a bit of a hack. In the folder System/Library/CoreServices there is a file DefaultDesktop.jpg - change that and viola! Um, it's not all that simple, however. Being a Unix filesystem it's a little tricky. You must be logged in with admin rights.

1. Find a suitable picture for the background
2. Name it DefaultDesktop.jpg in a folder other than the CoreServices - say, the desktop
3. Remove the current DefaultDesktop.jpg from CoreServices. You will need to enter your administrative password
4. Copy in the new DefaultDesktop.jpg. You will need to enter your password

You could probably do it all from a shell window as root much easier. I found that from Finder I was unable to rename files in that folder.

Finally, I was so pleased to see my local network servers and workstations appear in my finder. The bummer is that they no longer show up. And I'm back again unable to connect to the Windows machines. That's a serious downer because I was finally tempted to make this my primary personal workstation. The continued inability to seamlessly connect to the network servers really means that for me this is really just a high priced Internet kiosk.

Leopard chapter 2

Well, I got home and restarted the iMac to figure out what the wireless problem was. It came back up and the wireless was working just fine. Go figure. It took me about a millisecond to change the desktop from the funky aurora whatever to something nicer. I like the Japanese temple by the lake. Peaceful. It'd make a great summer home :)

I've played around with it a little - the bomb! I can access my windows shares on my servers and desktop machine. I had never gotten that to work before but now I entered my Windows credentials in the login popup and can see the shared folders. Awesome.

I also like the spaces - the multiple desktops. And over all it feels snappier, though some things are slower to come up. I like that when I turned on my Western Digital "My Book" external drive (with the intention of setting up the "Time Machine" backup service) the OS popped up a message asking if I wanted to use it for the Time Machine and automatically set it up. Nice.

I really like the Parental Controls - there was some before but I think it's been updated. It looks very useful.

So ya - I think I'll keep it :)