Mac crash post #1
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My MacBook Pro just crashed again. I got the little black box that says, in about four languages “you must restart your computer.”
That makes four days since the last time it crashed. Just for fun, I’m going to start making a post every time my Mac crashes when I’m doing something (relatively) harmless.
This time, it crashed after I plugged in my external HDD. Yes, external drives are iffy. No, it should not cause a complete system failure.
Bleh
I showed up to campus early today so that I would have time, before going to class, to check my mail for the hard drive that is supposed to be delivered today, and to pick up a copy of the student creative magazine Steez, which is supposed to include an article I wrote.
Supposed to.
The hard drive didn’t show up, although the tracking number inexplicably tells me that the delivery date is supposed to be today, and that the package has been in a warehouse 10 miles away since Friday morning.
My article isn’t in the magazine.
But it’s all mitigated by the fact that I just had one of the most delicious sandwiches at a Wine and Cheese shop that Ethan knew about. Delicious.
The Secret to Being Intelligent
Have you ever noticed that people appear more intelligent when they imply things instead of stating them explicitly? I noticed this when I was in High School, and it got me good grades in otherwise hopeless situations.
Let’s say, for example, that you come across a burly fisherman in a bar. On a good day he could teach you how to navigate by the stars, the best places to catch different kinds of fish, and he probably knows how to walk the plank.
But since he knows how to do all of these things in detail, it’s not really that impressive. It’s like watching a magic show with a colorful step-by-step follow-along pamphlet.
If you were to ask the fisherman about literature, however, he might be able to dazzle you with unspecific pearls such as these “Twain’s The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County really makes a assertion about the state of literature at the time of its writing.”
Now that’s a pretty fair bet. Mark Twain was an intelligent guy, and literature usually “says something” about itself. It’s self-indulgent like that. Also, the fisherman might gesture with his hook-hand while saying it, making him more imposing.
Also, luckily, people fill these logical gaps with thoughts like “did I leave the shower on this morning?” and “how often do frogs procreate?”, so you get the benefit of the doubt.
That’s it. That’s the trick to looking intelligent. Go forth, and be smarter.
Provantage: instant shipping
I’m in the process of building a new gaming beast. My previous beast is now a dinosaur, struggling to pump Counter-Strike: Source out on a 1680×1050 monitor at just over 30 fps with all the settings cranked down to the low end.
The exciting bit is that all the different components have been ordered and are being shipped to me from various locations. I’ve got my hands on a 2.4 Intel Core 2 Duo chip, a nice Asus motherboard, and 2 GB of ram. I plan to overclock this sucker.
On Tuesday I went in to Fry’s to have a look at the cases, see which ones I liked. I settled on the sweet looking Antec Solo, which I ordered Wednesday from Provantage.
And yesterday it arrived. WTFInstantShipping? Awesome. Now I need to wait for the power supply, the hard drive (500GB), and the Video Card…
[UPDATE] Just checked the tracking number on my video card (8600 GTS, the cheap man’s DX10 card), and it took 8 hours to ship, and arrived this morning!!! Instant shipping!!
Good God of War II
A week or so ago I was idly writing an article lamenting the fact that there aren’t any video games aside from, say, Guitar Hero that I’m really excited about playing. Scrrrrratch that immediately.
Go get God of War II.
I missed the first game mostly because I never, ever play games using the PS2 game pad. I know (many) people who swear up and down that it’s the best game pad ever made, but I think they’re bonkers. I can’t can’t can’t use it.
But this game is well worth the effort. It strikes that delicate balance of badass action and puzzle solving, just like Prince of Persia Sands of Time did for the Xbox several years ago when it came out (is it really four years? damn). In fact, Prince of Persia was probably the last game that hooked me the way this one has.
One cool trick that took my friends and I about three hours to notice is that there are no load times in the game. Somehow they managed to pull of that neat trick while still shoving unbelievably good graphics onto the PS2. I can only imagine if this game were for a newer console how nuts it would look.
Without wanting to say too much, the controls are intuitive, the cutscene-driven story is *gasp* interactive, which avoids the Final Fantasy trap, and you play the God of War is he embarks on a brand new quest of revenge to defeat Zeus, the conniving bastard king of Olympus. How much better does it get?
Go play this game.
We Were Dead Before The Ship Even Sank
I got the new Modest Mouse album for my birthday on Monday and I’ve been listening to it a lot since then. I like pretty much every song on this CD, it’s great.
My favorite track at the moment is probably Dashboard. Click the link below to have a listen.
Cripes it crashes a lot
I don’t know what it is that I’m doing that makes OSX hate me so much, but this laptop crashes ALL THE FREAKING TIME.
It just crashed for the second time today. The first time it crashed after I clicked on a link from Google. The second time it crashed when I left it alone in the other room for a while. It gave me this indecipherable info:
panic(cpu 0 caller 0×001A429B): Unresolved kernel trap (CPU 0, Type 14=page fault), registers:
CR0: 0×8001003b, CR2: 0xaedac033, CR3: 0×00dd0000, CR4: 0×000006e0
EAX: 0xaedac003, EBX: 0×80000003, ECX: 0×38911578, EDX: 0×09b5d3f0
CR2: 0xaedac033, EBP: 0×1401bd28, ESI: 0×389093f0, EDI: 0×1249b308
EFL: 0×00010202, EIP: 0×00a09c84, CS: 0×00000008, DS: 0×00000010Backtrace, Format - Frame : Return Address (4 potential args on stack)
0×1401bae8 : 0×128d08 (0×3cb134 0×1401bb0c 0×131de5 0×0)
0×1401bb28 : 0×1a429b (0×3d0e4c 0×0 0xe 0×3d0670)
0×1401bc38 : 0×19ada4 (0×1401bc50 0×25ad0e00 0×1 0×1)
0×1401bd28 : 0×9e37f4 (0×125cd004 0×389093f0 0×9b5d3f0 0xaedac003)
0×1401bf08 : 0×39a463 (0×1249b308 0×29bd800 0×1 0×26a6cec)
0×1401bf58 : 0×399635 (0×29bd800 0×135eb4 0×0 0×26a6cec)
0×1401bf88 : 0×39936b (0×29c8840 0×0 0xac1007 0×0)
0×1401bfc8 : 0×19ac1c (0×29c8840 0×0 0×10 0×0) Backtrace terminated-invalid frame pointer 0×0
Kernel loadable modules in backtrace (with dependencies):
com.apple.driver.AirPortAtheros(211.2)@0×9b5000
dependency: com.apple.iokit.IONetworkingFamily(1.5.1)@0×6bf000
dependency: com.apple.iokit.IOPCIFamily(2.2)@0×582000
dependency: com.apple.iokit.IO80211Family(140.4)@0×999000Kernel version:
Darwin Kernel Version 8.9.1: Thu Feb 22 20:55:00 PST 2007; root:xnu-792.18.15~1/RELEASE_I386
Woohoo, uncrashable mac!
Communicating with new technology
One of the ironies of taking a class about new media technologies is that it is taking something that is inherently an individual activity (browsing and participating in the internet), and making it a group type thing.
This week (and part of next week) we are presenting to the class on a range of topics, picked by each of us a few weeks ago.
What we are discovering, or at least what I am discovering, is that while blogs, wikis, and web technology makes a cool new way to communicate between people across the internet, they don’t do much to the science of presentation.
Blogs are designed to work between individuals sitting at computer screens. So are web sites. It’s difficult to adapt a medium designed specifically to engage on an individual level to become an effective presentation tool.
In other words, web communications work when you want to reach a large number of people on an individual basis. If you want to reach a large number en masse, there are better tools out there.
George Washington!
My friend Jeff just showed me a sweet YouTube video. Lucky you, you get to see it too:
Eeek, these are pro-gun arguments?
Now let me start this off by saying that I’m OK with allowing US Citizens to own guns. I’m not sure I can defend that viewpoint, because I think it’s incredibly difficult to rationalize the opinion “sure it can kill people, but it’s also fun to kill animals.”
It’s one of those things that you just have to admit is a little bit indefensible.
However, the LA Times thinks differently. While I agree with his eventual closing (”we need to work harder to identify and cope with dangerously unstable personalities”), I’m a little worried about his arguments against expanding gun control.
As I see it, they boil down to these:
- It’s politically impossible (or at least hopelessly improbable) to eliminate legal gun sales, and therefore people will always be able to get hold of guns.
Okay, but that’s not really an argument for anything. That’s just saying “there’s guns around, so get used to people dying.”
and two,
- People need guns for self-defense
Which is a great argument until he lists several examples, all along the lines of “this guy who had a gun stopped some one else from shooting him.” Well…guess what? If neither of you has a gun, nobody’s getting shot in that situation either.
Now sure, it works OK as an argument if you take point one as a premise, but I think gun control laws are specifically designed to affect (hopefully downward) the number of people who have guns.
Good writing in the sunday opinion section
I picked up the Sunday LA Times today (mostly because of the Blue Angels picture on the front page - really sad news about the crash), and I just finished combing through the book review, opinion, and business sections.
One thing that strikes me as I spend more time actually reading the paper is how good some of the writing really is, when authors are given the space to really work some magic. One of my favorite pieces from today’s paper is called Revenge of the Hollywood Desk Slaves:
FOR FOUR weeks in April of 2006, I was an Internet celebrity. In one industry, in one city, I was a star. The blogs went crazy. Defamer was all over me. National Public Radio wanted an interview — but I turned them down. My site got more than a million hits in 24 hours.
It all started one morning the previous December, the same week the Hollywood Reporter listed the 100 most powerful women in Hollywood — the trade’s equivalent of a swimsuit issue.
The first thing I did that morning was run to Starbucks and get my boss’ drink of choice, a double tall latte with caramel sauce, not caramel syrup because “it tastes like trans fats.” I was a Hollywood assistant, one of hundreds of young, ambitious college graduates in L.A. getting coffee that morning. It was always better to get the coffee before we got busy rolling calls. (Rolling calls, for the uninitiated, is when an assistant acts as a telephone operator. The boss calls from out of the office. Then, with the boss still on the line, the assistant calls someone else and links them together.)
It’s a good read.
Cell phone expenses
I had one of those moments today when I took a moment to think about something, and was surprised by what I noticed: I pay over $50 a month for my cell phone. I love T-mobile, they’ve been nothing but great for me, but now that carrying cell phone calls is no longer a premium premium brand new service, it’s time for the rates to drop a little bit.
Now, cell service is generally somewhat expensive, and I know that, but it’s kind of odd to think that on top of all my other bills I’m paying that much per month to carry a working phone with me. I also get 400 text messages a month with my plan (a limit I’m currently exceeding until the 27th when my plan cycles).
But if I want to do the cool, full-on internet on my phone that’s another $30. And if I want to add more text messages so I don’t get charged for additional texts, that’s another $5 or $10, depending on what I chose. Suddenly I’m at almost $100 for my cell phone bill.
It adds up fast! Maybe I should switch to a pay-as-you-go plan, and just divvy up minutes and texts out of the same pool. That’s what I did in England, and i remember it being way way cheaper.
Video games are not the anti-christ
It’s sick that in the wake of a huge tragedy like the shootings in Virginia there has to be a massive witch-hunt for the cultural scapegoat. We never look for real causes. We never looks for things that can actually be worked at, that can make a difference. We look for something to point our fingers at.
On Larry King, Dr. Phil McGraw said:
“The problem is we are programming these people as a society,” he said. “You cannot tell me — common sense tells you that if these kids are playing video games, where they’re on a mass killing spree in a video game, it’s glamorized on the big screen, it’s become part of the fiber of our society. You take that and mix it with a psychopath, a sociopath or someone suffering from mental illness and add in a dose of rage, the suggestibility is too high. And we’re going to have to start dealing with that.”
Video games cross the board in content. Of course violent video games exist, and many of them are fun. However, not only is there little evidence that the shooter even played video games, but video games are hardly the only–let along the most prevalent–form of violent imagery in our culture and environment.
If you think that you can survey the complex socio-economic landscape of the United States and pinpoint a subset of entertainment as an important causal force behind single events, then your basic statistics need some serious re-working.
I’m not idiotic enough to try to argue that playing a violent video game will never encourage violent behavior, because that’s obviously untrue. But I think that the fact that millions of reasonable people play violent video games without resorting to irrational brutal behavior in real life reveals a more important point: there is an untreated root cause in those cases where a video game can induce violence.
Or, put more succinctly: not everyone who plays counter-strike kills people, so I find it hard to believe that playing counter strike makes you kill people.
I think it’s far better to find out what ELSE might cause people to go on shooting rampages, and do something productive about it. Naturally you’ll never find a 100% across the board cause for every shooter ever, but you can find a stronger association than video games.
Lastly, association does NOT imply causation. Video games are popular in youth culture. Most of these shooters have been young. Chances are good they played video games. Chances are also good they drank water. Does water cause you to shoot people? Unlikely.
Bleh.
/disorganized rant
Comps: completed
Officially, I passed comps. I got a B. Which, really, is just fine, because I still get to graduate.
The largest shooting in American history
I tend to stay away from major major events like yesterday’s shooting at Virginia Tech because I feel like there’s very little I can add to a conversation that is already happening all over the internet.
Needless to say, this is tragic. And I would be remiss if I didn’t say how sorry I feel for the families of those who died.
See? I’m not good at this.
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