My MacBook is back. Got a new hard drive from Aria and she’s working fine now. Time machine restore took about 50 minutes, tops (possibly less as I had to leave the Mac so I could go watch Torchwood).
Warning, this is a full blown rant
Before Christmas, we were at Gatwick airport waiting for our flight to Spain to see the family. As usual, Laura and I hit the book stores to get some books for whilst we’re in Spain. It’s a useful way to catch up on any good books that have come out but we haven’t had time to find out about.
They had a whole section dedicated to modern literature classics. As a book fan, I do find it a bit embarrassing when I have to admit that I haven’t read a certain classic that appears to have been read by everyone and their dog. So here was an opportunity to get some of these books and finally get down to reading them.
Having read and been impressed with Reading Lolita in Tehran, I thought I should read Lolita. As Ms Nafisi had impressed me with her own book, I thought her recommendation that Lolita be viewed as a literary work about a mans obsession destroying not only the object of his desire, but also his own self, sounded compelling.
Sadly her recommendation sounded better than the actual experience. I managed about 40 pages before being bored beyond belief. Skimming through to see if it might get more interesting, I realised it really is what everyone thinks. A book about a dirty old man.
Not to worry, I had bought more books. Next up was Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Hmmm … seems this is actually a philosophical look at a road trip.
30 pages. That’s how long it took me to get really, and I mean really, bored.
Damn it, maybe I’m just selecting things too high brow for me (some may think by now that Neanderthal wall paintings are probably too high brow for me). So straight to American Psycho, that sounds like it might be a bit more action orientated.
Let’s see, 100 pages, vague hints at some murders ??? Seems to be very obsessed with what clothes he’s wearing and others are wearing. Cocaine use so high nobody remembers others names. Very boring. God, I can’t abandon a third book. Let’s keep on. Hey, bizarre incredibly detailed graphic description of characters sex life. ??? Hey, now a murder. A pointless and callous murder, but that’s OK, that’s the point, he’s a narcisstic psycho. And hey, another graphic sex scene. Ugh. It’s just ended in an even more graphic murder. Errr … no must continue reading. Hey, another murder. Wow, even more detailed. And another sex murder, now with even more detail. Now another double sex murder with detail that makes me want to stop the book. No, I’ll continue. There’s only about fifty more pages to get through. Wait a second. What the hell’s he going to do with the brie … Sweet Jesus, Bret Easton Ellis is fucked up. That’s it, this book goes straight into the bin.
Three modern classics of literature, three amazing disappointments (though American Psycho beats Lolita and Zen by about a million miles). I bought some 70′s Doctor Who books from eBay. Serious British SciFi pulp fiction. I’ll be reading those for the time being.
I’d been trying to work out why Mail.app hadn’t been working for the last two days. I was getting error -108XX error (don’t remember the code and you’ll see in a minute why I can’t just look it up). Basically the code is “unknown error”. Although some people had translated it as running out of process space (I really don’t understand how they managed that). Console also showed that Mail.app was SIGBUS erroring (generally a memory access violation type of issue).
I had installed Mail.app from the Leopard install disk, but that hadn’t fixed the problem. On a whim I though I’d reinstall the jumbo patch for 10.5.1. Lo and behold, Mail.app now started fine.
Then my menu bar disappeared. Sigh. Let’s restart the Macbook. Three finger salute to get the force quit dialog didn’t work, none of the icons on the dock worked, so it was a complete power down. It’s rare I have to do this, but I’m usually OK if I do, HFS+ journal replay works great. But this time I was a little apprehensive; see about two weeks back my file system had been trashed by the OS (or so I thought). Time machine restore worked a treat, but I hadn’t backed up in about a week, so some emails and other things had been lost (you can bet I’m going to buy iTimeCapsule, as well as a .mac subscription to sync up mail as a backup onto my Mac mini).
Powering up, everything looked OK, but when I press my ID to get the password prompt, nada. OK, let’s go for another forced power down. And here is where I discover what’s been going on. As the machine starts to power up, I hear, coming from the hard drive the dreaded “clunk … clunk” of a total failure. My drive is dead.
It’s now dawned on me that the real reason my file system was fried two weeks back, and that Mail.app was failing so badly, was my hard drive was on it’s way south. Now that it’s gone, I know what the problem is, but it doesn’t make me feel any better. Until the replacement drive I’ve ordered arrives, I’m sans MacBook. This thing is my baby, my workhorse. I’m lost with out it. Woe indeed.
I mean, I had to write this blog on a Windows machine. That’s just sick !
Having completed Mass Effect, I wondered what my next game would be. I haven’t unpacked the Wii since we moved house six months ago. I had heard that Undertow was free for download, so I tried that, and whilst I can see the game is quite well thought out, it really wasn’t for me. On a whim, I checked out other games in Xbox Live Arcade, and I came across Arkadian Warriors. It’s a lovely little RPG in the old console style. I’m quite taken with it at the moment, and it’s nice to see such a well thought out XBLA game. I haven’t really tried many, but this game makes me want to check out some others.
