Hamm On Wry

As a continuation of my last post, I would like to point out a rather interesting solution that I discovered today for a problem that has been plaguing the business I now work for since, well, Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. Namely, that it doesn’t work. But I think I’m ahead of myself, so let me set the scene.

I’ve been working in video production for a few weeks now back in Helena, Montana, after randomly finding this job on CraigsList Montana and I must say, it’s nice. It’s been a long time since my work was appreciated by a superior or employer, so it’s been more than fun being here, it’s been restorative. Healthy even. It’s also been frustrating because of the random disk problems we’ve been having, which started long before I arrived.

However, now it all seems to be well, and without going into the details, here’s the gist of it. The editing bay is a PowerMac G5 with a Serial ATA RAID set-up that was developed by the apparently-now-defunct Netcell company. So there isn’t much in the way of support, even from the people who sold us this system. Not cool. But after nearly 10 full business days of insanity, it seems I’ve discovered part of the problem - and it’s a simple friggin check box.

If you are having random freezes where the Spinning Colorwheel of Death is up but absolutely nothing on the computer responds (other than the cursor moving with the mouse, of course) I know what you need to do. Go into System Preferences, Energy Settings and uncheck the “Put disks to sleep whenever possible” option. That has solved the problem for us, although your mileage may vary.

I’d go into more detail if anyone wants to know the entire mess, but I really don’t feel like delving that far tonight. Me wanty food. Ciao!

Look, design is making function beautiful, and making beauty functional. Consistently Apple is a leader in design for software and hardware. And Microsoft is an also-ran, albeit a well-funded one. And then there is OS X’s Finder, and the inability to just do what is reasonable.

However this weeks “Tip of the Week” is really a “Steaming Bowl of Shit” that no one should be subject to when trying to burn multiple sessions to a CD. It’s mind-boggling insanity to burn files to a disc, with the rather odd assumption that dragging a file to a CD means that the user would want to burn a fucking alias and not the actual file. Who in hell came up with that user-interaction? How the hell is that ‘mac-like’ at all? And you know what, it didn’t always work this way, I’m almost positive that in 10.2 you just drag-n-drop your files on a mounted CD and burn and voila you’ve got a disc of useful files. Now you have to drag and hold down the option key to get real files onto the disc. WHY?

It’s just one part of the Finder that’s fucked, and I sincerely hope the whole thing gets fixed. And if you’re wondering why this post is full of expletives, well, it’s because I expect better things of a company like Apple. Just like my customers expect better things of me.

Well, it’s Montana, and dammit, it’s stupid cold, as tonight we reach TWENTY. BELOW. ZERO! I can’t believe that I’m back in this weather, but at least it’s 2006 and not 1906. I was informed tonight that heating oil can freeze, by my dad who had, of course, heard it from his grandfather. I can only imagine that the conversation went something like;

[Old Man]: Back in the Winter of Aught Six it got so cold we had to mix alcohol with our heating oil.

[Young Man]: To keep it from freezing?

[Old Man]: Hell no! ‘Cause it tastes like shit otherwise.

Ok, so I’ve not been posting, not been writing, not been anything for a month. It’s been a nice break as my life has taken a wild turning not expected by anyone, least of all me. However, I’m not ready to go into that yet, so I’m just posting this for pure self-aggrandizement. Or self-help. Or plain greed. Something.

Anyway by posting a link to Mac App A Day, they’re going to let me know which apps are coming up 12 hours early (you might want to do the same thing on your blog). Since the people behind this are also behind My Dream App it would seem only fitting that, at the least, this will be interesting.

Also, I’m doing a bunch of back-end reworking of my site, and I’m moving to Django for this site, and that means I get to build the entire thing over again. Such bloody fun. I will post more soon!