Anotherblog

iPods - the explanation

I took the iPod to the repair people yesterday morning. When I grabbed it in the morning, I turned it on to see if it would be contrary and suddenly start working. It didn’t, but it didn’t turn off either: it went endlessly through the powerup cycle: the harddrive would start to spin with a click and a whir, and after a few seconds, give up. Then try again. Click, whir. Click, whir. All the way there. It felt as though it was trembling. When I put it on the counter, the smooth but slightly warped surface meant that it was balanced on an almost frictionless fingertip-sized point. Click, whir, and the iPod would rotate twenty degrees, and then stop. Click, whir, twenty degrees.

“Wow,” said the repairman. “Never seen that before.”

It turns out that my Power Mac is probably to blame for all the iPods dying. When OSX10.2 crashed a few months ago, I reinstalled it, but it didn’t quite reinstall properly. It refused to update. Apparently, the new iPods require at least OSX10.2.8, so when I plugged them into the Power Mac to upload songs, it was screwing things up. And, apparently, badly enough to really mess with the iPods. So there ya go. I’ve now got OSX10.4, which works fine. So perhaps there will be no more of these fatally trembling iPods.

Jogging

I went jogging last night, and again tonight. So yeah, like everything else I do, I get carried away with enthusiasm. It’d be nice if I can make this last, but I’m well past the point of getting annoyed with myself for being faddish.

Anyhoo. I’ve hit an important milestone with jogging, I think, which is that for the first time this evening, for more than half the time I was thinking of things other than jogging. Until now, I mostly thought about how sore my legs were, how far there was to go, whether I should get new shoes, whether I was going to get mugged or run over, whether I should go on a fun run, amazement that I haven’t had to stop yet, and so on. This evening I thought about the plot for the Doctor Who novel, the D&D game I’m running, potential Film Forensics for Sin City, Fantastic Four, Batman Returns, the recent series of Doctor Who and Battlestar Galactica, about the magic tournament, and so on. In other words, by my standards, it was useful time.

I saw something mildly interesting last night, too. I was going along the moonlit bikepath along the river, and there were two flashing red LEDs on the path ahead of me. I assumed they were bikes, but they were moving a little erratically, and as I approached, I realised they were too low. But I still had no idea what they were. They weren’t shaped like rear lights - more like red flashing test-tubes. And they were right near the ground. At first, I thought (presumably from guilt at my unfinished short film) they were remote-controlled cars. Then, as I finally got close enough, I realised they were two small dogs, meandering randomly along the path, lights attached to their collars. Their owner was another twenty metres further up the path.

Crappy Rare Tournament

I played the first games of the crappy rare tournament today. I’m currently at 1-1 against David MM. I must admit, I really was a little worried that the games wouldn’t be all that interesting - that most of the cards would be so crappy that the game would be won by the first player to get out a creature, which would beat the opponent to death. But noooo. I won the first game with a winter orb out, which meant my rogue skycaptain changed sides pretty much every turn, which meant that every second turn I was safe from attack by his flier, which meant that he eventually died from ping damage from his own serindib efreet. I wasn’t helped at all by my mijae djinn, which (on a coinflip) refused to attack five times in a row. That would have been 30 damage.

And the second game was just as interesting. I took ten damage from an onulet, then got the djinn out. Then he got out a minion of leshrak (which does five damage to you each turn if you can’t sacrifice a creature), killed off most of the board (suffering much damage as he did so) and finally ‘donate’d it to me to deal me the final five damage. Fun and thrilling.

The draft for the tournament was yesterday, and it was a lot of fun too. I ended up drafting mostly red, on the back of the aforementioned djinn, and I’m quite pleased with my deck. It is both crappy and great.

Su Doku

Getting better at ‘em. Ever since my Dad mentioned his addiction, and the fact that he didn’t write any hints on the page, I have jealously been trying to do the same. I’ve got the hang of it now. I’ve even been able to solve one or two of the fiendish puzzles without notes (although, obviously, with guesswork. The fiendish ones seem to require at least one guess. The trick to the fiendish ones is to find the single guess that will solve the puzzle either way. The worst kind of thing is when the guess neither solves the puzzle nor disproves the hypothesis.)

Latest in a long line of dead iPods

My iPod is dead. This one lasted a month, a new record for me breaking my iPod. I really have no idea what is causing it: I didn’t drop it, or plug it into the RoadTrip, or get it wet, or anything. In any case, it’s the same problem, except this time it happened suddenly: I pressed play, the song froze, and that was that. Maybe there’s some terrible bit of music that kills the thing, like Douglas Hofstadter’s Record That Cannot Be Played On Record-player X.

My mac has also been acting strangely for a while, but I’ve been tolerating it until today. It was refusing to update, and some things wouldn’t install, and some things wouldn’t run. I reinstalled the operating system on another partition, and it worked again, but I couldn’t get mail going, and transferring all the system settings across was looking like it was going to be a pain. It occurred to me yesterday that the OSX strangeness might have been the cause of the iPod strangeness, so when I was in town I bought a copy of OSX10.4 and installed it. It’s very pretty. Didn’t fix the iPod, but the iPod seems beyond the point of repair.

Anyway, now the mac is working very nicely again, and I have funky new widgets, and I finally got around to looking at RSS. It’s just as well the mac is better: the PC got so many viruses and other malware, it became unusable, and we passed it to Anna’s brother for repair (he’s in the sys admin business). It’s been gone for two months or longer now, so Anna’s only computer access has been through the (until now semi-broken) mac. And yet she didn’t seem to mind. I am puzzled by this lack of reliance on computers.

Jogging

The jogging frenzy continues: I went last night too, and it was the most enjoyable yet. And I’m going for a walk (in lieu of going to the gym) tonight with Bill, to try and get him fit enough for the ski trip.

Other minutiae of my existance:

I bought two polo shirts from eBay from Marco, but nobody else bid on them, so I got ‘em for a dollar each.

I did another one-on-one Magic draft against Gary yesterday, and we managed the draft, the deck construction, and three games in an hour. 2-1 to him so far, with his RGw deck against my BUw. However, because he managed to draft two 5/5 dragons, I suspect he’ll win this particular tournament.

The “crap rare” draft tournament is now due to start on Monday, and we’re all getting quite excited about it.

I’ve been playing a lot more classical guitar recently, and it has been very pleasing. I’m playing better than ever before. The burst of playing in April didn’t seem to do much at the time, but now that I have a bit of distance from it, my fingers are falling more naturally and calmly on the fretboard, and the tone is much nicer too. It’s getting quite enjoyable to just muck around.

And the headset worked very well during last night’s teleconference.

Caffeine & Teleconferences

I’m back on caffeine in the form of “V” and coke. The reason is, staying awake until (let alone through) the Tuesday and Thursday teleconferences is proving difficult. And, of course, once I’m having caffeine on some days, I have to have it on all days.

As one of the guys at work pointed out, that gives me significantly more sugar than your usual coffee addict, so I’ve been doing more jogging to compensate. I went jogging last night after dinner (a bad idea, which will not be repeated: Anna’s mushroom soup + extra garlic + beer + homemade bread is delicious but not amenable to being stirred up in my stomach) and again at lunchtime today. This is keeping me from vibrating too much. Perhaps I should just give up and learn to like coffee.

On the bright side, last night’s teleconference went much better than last week’s. I still said the occasional idiotic comment, but I followed what was happening pretty well, and for the first time, other people said the things I thought (but didn’t say for fear of appearing even more idiotic). To celebrate, I bought a nice headset, which plugs straight into a normal phone in place of the receiver, so there will be no more worries about the battery running out.

Beer tasting tonight at Rich’s place, in lieu of D&D, which has been postponed a number of weeks until we can all be there at the same time. Rich is the friend who gave up a career in IT to become a professional brewer.

Worky weekend

I managed a bit more work over the weekend than I’ve done in a while, mostly on the novel proposal. In fact, I got very excited about it and wrote up a cascading series of clomping plot elements that could be included, and for a while, I was very, very pleased with myself. In the harsh light of day, the ideas still look pretty good, and I think we can definitely do something with them, but they’re probably not as original as I was thinking at first.

Also finished watching both “Six Feet Under” and “Arrested Development”. Both good, but I don’t see any reason why I’d rewatch Six Feet Under, and Arrested Development has leaped straight to the head of my “comfort-viewing” queue. I’m going to be rewatching episodes a lot. Especially the episode “Pier Pressure”. Wow, it was funny. I wander when the second season will be released?

And finally, I went for another jog, and it felt good again. I keep getting surprised when I don’t feel terrible after a jog. The first jog I did after catching my cold was kinda slow and I ended up walking for most of it. But this time: back to full strength. I can see how it gets addictive. However, tonight I shall be going to the gym in order to encourage Anna’s brother Bill to get fit, so that he can come skiing with us in August. Which reminds me: gotta send an email to the other skiiers on this topic.

Sin City

Sin City is precisely as hard-boiled a film as I expected. It’s a crunchy gobstopper of a movie with more moxie than any other film I’ve seen this year. Gorgeous design.

And yet… it was a little disappointing too. It’s essentially three short films, shown in sequence. There aren’t enough connections between the segments to really say why those three, of the many Sin City comics, were chosen to be in the film. I can’t help thinking they might have benefitted from more of a Pulp Fiction approach, weaving the stories together a little more organically, switching between them so their finales all occur at the end.

As Bob The Angry Flower might say, you can’t go scared, sad, exhilerated, relieved, scared, sad, exhilerated, relieved, scared, sad, exhilerated, relieved; ya gotta go scared, scared, little relieved, scared, sad, exhilerated, scared, really sad, relieved, exhilerated, really exhilerated, really really exhilerated!

Not that these were the beats. I’m just saying.

Racquet breaking

I broke my squash racquet today, mostly due to whapping it against the wall, though the thing that caused the head to fly off the handle was a backhand smash. I had not been playing well, but my frustration was more to do with the teleconference last night.

A little background is in order: Ian B., my opponent, also plays regularly against his flatmate who is apparently a racquet abuser of the first order, as well as being rather vocal on the court when he does badly. Ian B. is amused by this. Hence, I have been becoming more expressive myself, safe in the knowledge that it’s not going to worry him. Today is the first time I have whapped the wall with the racquet, though, and although it felt good at the time, it probably wasn’t replacement-racquet good.

Anyway. My frustration was mostly due to a very embarassing teleconference last night. I agreed to take minutes. There is an IRQ session that goes on at the same time as the phone conversation, for people to paste in URLs and the like, and for the minute-taker to summarise the conversation. However, I have only been to three previous teleconferences, so I wasn’t particularly good at associating names with voices, and I wasn’t familiar with the issues at all, which made transcribing them even harder. I was struggling a lot. Then my phone ran out of charge, and I had to reconnect using the old phone, which didn’t have a hands-free option, making it rather difficult for me to continue taking notes. Craig (the person I am eventually replacing) had mercy on me and took over the minutes-taking for me.

And then, the harsh but fair bit: one of the other participants wrote “Craig, we are *so* going to miss you :-(”.

Well, huh. I probably shouldn’t have agreed to take minutes, but getting that message was a lot of a downer at the time. I have redoubled my efforts to try and look like less of an idiot. Reading up on standards, etc. And taking my feelings out on squash racquets.