July 2013

“My Mac won’t boot up.”

Now that’s not something you hear everyday. Macs are plug and play, right? Set ’em and forget ’em. It just works.

And it does just work, 99.9% of the time. I told Jamie to turn the computer off and just leave it; I would take a look at it before he got back from the tour he was about to embark on. I figured it was hot in his room and that the Mac was having some sort of overheating issue. I knew I felt overheated at the time.

Well I never got around to messing around with his computer so when he got home from the tour on Sunday afternoon he tried to start things up and ran into the same issue. It was time to flex my geek powers.

“I have four years of work on there!”

I had to assure Jamie that there was no reason to panic, after all, he had an external hard drive. Unfortunately, said drive wasn’t plugged into the computer.

No backup.

Ok, now I really had to flex my geek powers.

Now, here’s the thing (I should rename this blog “Here’s The Thing”). I have all sorts of tools and doodads to fix an issue with a Windows computer that is in this predicament. I’ve dealt with so many PC crashes over the years that I pretty much know what I’m doing and I can usually grab the data that is thought to be lost, even if I have to resort to voodoo and sacrifices. But the thing is, I never had to do this sort of thing on a Mac before. What to do, what to do.

Well, I’m not going to bore you with the minute details because that would be, well, boring, but after six or so hours, I was able to announce to Jamie, “I’m copying your Music and your Pictures folders over”. I was able to get to his data and copy it over to a external hard drive that I normally use to store my backups. The look of relief on his face said all the thanks that was necessary.

Inspired by this little Mac adventure, I have since rearranged our methods of backups for the entire household (we use a GoFlex Home NAS and am looking into additional backup services.

If you gain just one thing from this blog entry, please let it be this: always store your data in more than one place. It’ll save yourself from panic mode in the future. Because every computer can crash.

Even a Mac.

As a productive employee of a large telecommunications company, I feel it is my duty to have a landline at the house. While we don’t live in the footprint of the company I work for, there are some old habits that just don’t go away, so we have a wall phone in our kitchen with an extra long cord. Don’t tell anyone that it actually uses the Internet to communicate with others whilst our fingers do the walking.

The phone in the kitchen rarely rings. On the occasion that someone calls the house phone, we generally never know who they are. A random series of digits come up on the caller ID. 99% of the time the caller is a telemarketer.

During our lunch just moments ago, the house phone rang. Earl answered it. Apparently he hasn’t watched the same 1940s and 50s films that I have watched recently, the ones instructing the public on how to work the phone in a polite manner, because he didn’t answer, “Hello, this is Earl.” He said, and I quote, “What”. His manner was not overly jovial but it wasn’t offensive.

The caller was apparently taken aback by his curt greeting and stammered his way through part of a script when Earl said, “Who is this?”. Again, he wasn’t overly jovial but he wasn’t rude.

He then hung up the phone.

Apparently the caller said the wrong thing at the wrong time. I have to giggle because when Earl hung up the phone he did it exactly the same way as Grandpa Country used to hang up the phone: he just hung it up. No formalities, no farewell, no words at all, just ‘click’.

This prompted a very short discussion over lunch as to why we have a house phone. People that want to reach us do so via text message or email. If there is an emergency in the house, we’d reach for our iPhone. As mentioned earlier, the house phone is using VoIP (over the internet) so the whole “911 is going to pinpoint your location” thing might not hold water. And, to the apparent horror of many folks, we have to dial all 10 digits to call anywhere, local, long-distance, all of it. I mention this little horror bit because they’re looking to add another area code to our region and people are horrified by the idea of having to dial all 10-digits all the time. We’ve been doing it for years. I even do it on my iPhone. People need to keep up with the times.

Maybe we should get rid of the phone and save a few bucks.

As an avid user of Apple products (I’m typing this on my iPad4), I am bound by religious dogma to be ecstatic of anything that Apple does in the way of innovation. This is just one of the ways of the world and it is something that I fully accept.

Yesterday, Apple released iOS 7 Beta 3 to its developer community. Luckily, as a developer, I am part of that community (read: I have paid for the privilege of being part of that community). I installed iOS 7 Beta 3 on my iPhone 5 within 15 minutes of it being available. At no time did I lose any productivity time at work, I swear.

While I’m very excited about the new functionality that is starting to show itself in iOS 7, I have to admit that I am not excited at all about the new design elements, especially the typography. As you can see in the screenshot above, Apple, more specifically Jony Ive, the lead designer and engineer of the project, is favoring thin, “modern” looking fonts throughout this new version of iOS.

I’m not a fan. I’m not a fan because it just feels too “dainty” to me.

Now, I don’t know if I’m getting more set in my ways as I get older or if my tastes are falling even more out of step with the consensus of the general public, but I don’t want an expensive piece of technology to feel “delicate”. I don’t want a light, airy experience with my technology. I want to be able to embrace it, grapple it, and maul it. Perhaps this is just a quirk of my already quirky personality, but this is one of the reasons that I use Apple hardware to begin with; I like the metal and solid feel of my iProducts. If I wanted something delicate, I’d buy a (much) cheaper piece of plastic and silicon and call it a day.

As I continue to use my iPad with iOS 6 on it (the version everyone is used to), I find myself more comfortable with the experience because it feels less “delicate” and more resilient. Yes, the interface could use some freshening up, but I don’t think it needs to be so fresh that it feels like it’s been through a TV commercial that makes women roll their eyes (due to the unnatural talk between mother and daughter) and men downright uncomfortable. (You know what I’m talking about.)

I guess I’m going to have to find a way to butch my iPhone back up a bit. The user of an ever-so-slightly bolder font in this latest beta is a slight step in the right direction but I don’t think we’re going to ever get back to that feeling of “metal and hooah” that I somewhat feel in iOS 6.

Maybe I’ll put a piece of duct tape on the back or something.

After upgrading to the latest beta of iOS today, I commented to Siri that her voice was changing.