So, a couple months ago, shortly after Tiger was released and installed, my Powerbook crashed. Well, it hung and I had to power it off–it didn’t come back quite right. I figured I did something nasty by the sudden power off, journaling filesystem be damned. I ended up re-installing Tiger again over a wiped hard drive and life seemed dandy again.

Until two weeks ago. System took a dive again. This time the Apple Hardware Test software is reporting errors with the hard drive. So it looks like the hard drive is toast, I’ll have to pay some $$$ to get it replaced since I never bothered with the extended warranty.

For a little while I was pissed at Apple. 1-year hardware warranty and I’m SOL unless I’d payed $350 (which I thought was a bit much) for AppleCare. Jokes on me, I’ll probably pay that much to get the HD replaced. Not really an expense I need right now.

But then I looked on the flip side. I’m using my Powerbook. How? External firewire hard drive. I’d used Carbon Copy Cloner (basically an rsync GUI) to make a complete, bootable copy of my system a while back. While I was using the OS. Booting into this system is as easy as holding down the option button after turning on the Powerbook. Boots seamlessly off the external hard drive, and even runs a bit faster I think because of faster HD speed. You can’t do that in Windows, and I imagine it would be a pain in Linux or any other OS.

So, while I no longer have a portable laptop until the internal hard drive is replaced, I’m got a very usable Apple desktop by virtue of an external hard drive. With the bluetooth mouse and keyboard I already had it’s actually even more usable. Even after this, I’m still a huge Apple fan. Hard drives have defects, they die. Shit happens. But at least I have a usable system while I wait.

Jay updated his blog to WordPress 1.5 and I did likewise. So I’m testing the Trackback stuff, the new admin panel and post stuff and also some Markdown lovin’ at the same time.

Jay, fix those permalinks! mod_rewrite is your friend.

NOPE!

Frequently whimsical and, at times, deeply personal, William Shatner’s latest album is altogether fun and enjoyable. Produced by Ben Folds, Shatner’s spoken-word poetry is the beat to which a plethora of guest musicians dance. Well, maybe there were dancing. I think the music was the primary goal.

So, pick up the album. I bought a couple tracks off iTunes (“Common People” and “I Can’t Get Behind That”, guests Joe Jackson and Henry Rollins respectively) and ended up shelling for the whole CD. Liner notes make for an interesting read as well.

Oh, and if you enjoy the Shatnerian whimsy I recommend adding Boston Legal to your Tivo. His character, Denny Crane, is just one of the many interesting characters that make up the ensemble.

This project by Jon Udell looks like a great synergy opportunity between Amazon and local libraries. Look up the book on Amazon, click the bookmarket and it’ll find the book at your local library. Libraries should pre-load this on all their public machines.

Mark told me that reference librarians already utilize Amazon in their work (because of the wealth of meta-data and excellent searching.) This could be a further timesaver.

What if Bush Wins? Interesting commentary from both sides of the fence.

New version of ecto is available.

Indispensable. A nice list of useful OSX apps. A lot of these I already use but I always like to see these lists and find something new.

As with the DNC, the speeches from the Republican National Convention are now available as free downloads from the iTunes Music Store.

Yeah, Atkins is bunk.