Slim Chants

I’ve been using Ecto to write articles, post them and manage the blog for the past month. I like it so much I paid for a license before the trial ended. This tool is so much more convenient and effective. I much prefer the quick response of a desktop app over an HTML interface which is inherently slow. The convenience has resulted in more time spent writing. I especially like being able to work offline and then publish when I can get connected. For anyone using a Mac I highly recommend it.

Remember the 407. S’all I got to say.

Jim Prentice is the latest of Stephen Harper’s cabinet to join The Bad News Bears. This grizzly bunch have all been burdened with the task of delivering a bad news story. Jim Flaherty is the chief bear, having been the most often to deliver a bad news story while the Prime Minister lay in hiding. Other bears include Peter MacKay, Stockwell Day, and Jim Baird.

The Prime Minister is always on hand when there is a good news story to be told. Tonight he’s attending the state dinner held by the Queen of Denmark while Minister Jim addresses the assembly in Copenhagen to tell them that Canada will be the rogue of the developed nations, supporting the interests of oil companies over the future of the planet.

This is the first gathering of world leaders to develop and sign a treaty since Versailles and the Prime Minister sent a subordinate to speak while he hides at a non-public event. Why did he even go to Copenhagen? There MUST be a Tim Horton’s opening in Canada somewhere!

I upgraded my hard drive yesterday. I decided to cover all my bases and have plenty of backup. I got started on Sat. evening by plugging in a large USB drive I had kicking around. Time Machine fired up and asked if I wanted to use it for backups. I went along and was prompted to reformat the drive for the exclusive use of Time Machine. Once the drive was configured Time Machine took a backup of the OS X drive. It ran silently in the background. I left the MacBook Pro plugged in to the drive for the evening and TM took a backup (incremental) every hour. I ended up with 5 backups.

I followed instructions I found on the web here and here to replace the drive. As it happens, you need a Torx T-6 driver to remove two of the many screws that have to come out to get at the hard drive. I had to wait until Sunday when I could get the necessary tools to crack the case as a result. Many PC type computers I’ve worked with make replacement of internal components quite simple. Field Replaceable Units (FRUs) they call them. Well, if the difficulty of accessing and removing/replacing components in a Mac is any indication of the reliability of said components, my mind has been put at ease. I had to remove something like 17 screws (teeny weenie screws at that!) to open the case and get at the hard drive in my MacBook Pro.

The video instructions had a step to install the new drive in a USB case, open Disk Utility and copy the old disk partition onto the new drive, so I did that. The I went through the tedious process of removing all the screws, opening the case and removing the old drive. The instructions were very accurate and complete in this regard. I removed the old drive and installed the new drive, a 320 GB Seagate Momentus 7200 RPM drive. The old drive is 120 GB 5400 RPM Fuji.

After replacing all the screws to reassemble the case I pressed the power switch to boot the computer and was very disappointed when it did not boot off the new drive. So I inserted the Snow Leopard DVD and booted off that. I restored the backup from Time Machine to the new drive and rebooted. Merde! The drive continued to fail to boot. In the end I installed a fresh copy of Snow Leopard and on first boot it asked if I wanted to transfer information from another image or a backup or network location. I plugged in the old drive (now mounted in the USB case) and chose that. It copied over all the user settings, applications, files, etc to the new drive and I was back in business with a new, larger, faster hard drive, and a spare 120 GB USB drive for music backup.

I’m pleased with the result. My Acer had 160 GB. I now have 320 GB and it’s nice and quick. The new drive cost me $72.99 CDN. Next I’ll upgrade the RAM.

Now my brother has one. My brother is a lawyer. He bought a NetBook recently, an Acer One, for courtroom work. He has an Acer laptop that he uses at the office. He’s not terribly pleased with the NetBook. It came with Vista Home Basic and TigerDirect won’t give him an upgrade to Windows 7 so he’s kinda pissed. Anyway, his laptop in the office stopped working after making a shreaking noise, never a good thing. So he went down to Best Buy to see what they had and the salesman asked him if he’d ever considered a Mac. Showed him a MacBook and explained how they don’t get viruses and how they do’t need defragging and how easy they are to use. So he bought one. He’ll probably off the NetBook now; the MacBook is halfway between a fullsize laptop and a NetBook so it serves both purposes.   

I FAXed my registration form and fee for kayak rolling lessons in the pool at the Aquatics Centre, McMaster University next March/April. The course consists of three one hour guided sessions in the pool. There are no prerequisites. Here is the description:

Three hours of kayaking instruction by instructors from the McMaster Whitewater Club (1 hr / week for 3 weeks). This concentrated clinic will teach you how to roll in 3 short hours. You don’t need any previous experience to take this course. This course includes access to weekly open sessions.

I’m looking forward to this. I’m hoping they’ll let me use my Greenland SOF. I’ll blog about the experience.