rinzai a site for raven zachary

Wi-Fi rollout in Portland

The city-wide Wi-Fi network in Portland, Oregon, kicked off this week with the first set of wireless access nodes coming online. The service is being rolled out by MetroFi. They have posted a map showing the wireless access nodes currently online in Portland. CIO Tech Informer has posted an article about the rollout. Access is free (1MB down and 256kb up) but web pages will be proxied and include ads on the top of each rendered page. An ad-free version of the service is available for a subscription, along with faster access plans.

I do not currently have coverage at my office or home. I am going to try the service in the next few days from one of the coverage areas.

The curse of the early adopter

Oh boy. I am so tired of computer problems. I am writing this blog entry from my wife’s MacBook, as I am currently without a working computer. Blogging about my computer problems is a bit cathartic. You may remember my entry from early October entitled, “My four-day ordeal with 10.4.8.” I spent 28 hours over a period of four days recovering from a system upgrade failure. Well, November easily tops October for computer pain. My MacBook Pro gets fixed by Apple not once, not twice, but three times in one month. Read on…

NOTE: If you have sent me an email in the past month or so and are still waiting for a response, it’s likely due to the fact that time I would normally spend responding to emails has been spent dealing with computer problems.

I purchased the first generation of the MacBook Pro in February, and over the course of the past nine or so months, I knew that I would need to send this computer in for repair. This was Apple’s first experience with the Intel chip in a portable enclosure and problems were likely. There were lots of little problems - flaking keyboard paint, a blown speaker, and a problem waking from sleep from time to time. None of these problems were serious enough to limit my productivity, and as an AppleCare subscriber, I had three years to address these problems.

When I was in New York City in early November, I started having a problem where the computer would lock up for 5-10 minutes during which the cursor would turn into the infamous beach ball and there would be a correspondingly loud sound below the keyboard that sounded like hard drive access. This would happen sometimes 2-3 times in one hour, making it impossible to get any work done. When I returned home from New York City, I copied all my data to my kids’ iMac and prepared to send the computer in for repair. It took almost two days to copy the data off the MacBook Pro due to intermittent disk copy failure and corrupted files. Not fun.

For four days, I worked off the iMac in the kids’ bedroom. This worked mostly ok, it was just a pain not to be mobile and not have the ability to work from my office. I guess I could have moved the iMac to the office - it just would have limited my ability to work at night, as well. Apple replaced the logic board, the keyboard, and the blown speaker. I spent six to eight hours copying the data back to the MacBook Pro from the iMac. I was back online. Unfortunately, after just a day of use, the problem with the hanging system came back.

So, here I go again - I copied all of the data that changed over the past 24 hours back to the iMac, and dropped the computer off at the Apple Store. At this point, I believed the problem to be a bad hard drive. What else could it be? The logic board had already been replaced, and this would have been the most likely culprit. I could not replicate the problem at the Apple Store, but I was able to kill disk activity after running the CPU at 100% for more than 15 minutes while copying 10GB of data. This was the Thursday before Thanksgiving and I was off to Albuquerque on Sunday for a nine-day trip. I asked Apple to send the computer to Albuquerque. In the meantime, I copied my data from the iMac over to a portable hard drive so I could work off my wife’s MacBook during our trip.

On the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, I noticed that the status of my repair on the Apple website had changed to “need more information.” I called Apple to resolve the situation. It seems that the Apple repair depot in Houston, Texas, could not replicate the system hang or the disk access failure problems. Apple could not confirm that the hard drive was having problems. I spent 30 minutes on the phone with Apple trying to convince them that what I needed was a new hard drive - what else could it be? On Wednesday, the computer was shipped to Albuquerque, and I received it on Friday. Apple replaced the hard drive, and replaced the logic board…again…a logic board that I had for only one day.

I spent Friday copying files back to the MacBook Pro. The insanity was over, or so I thought. This evening while preparing to upload some new photos to Flickr, I put the computer to sleep to carry the computer into the kitchen at my in-laws house. When waking from sleep, the screen was blank. I rebooted - it froze on the bootup screen the white Apple logo. I rebooted again - the screen went grey for a minute and then the much dreaded flashing folder with the question mark appeared accompanied by strange licking sounds from the hard drive. Every trick failed - booting from the repair disk, attempting to reinstall the OS, mounting the drive in target disk mode, zapping the PRAM, resetting the power management unit. Nothing. The disk is dead. Tomorrow morning, I am headed to the Apple Store in Albuquerque to drop off my computer for the third time this month. Ack!

I don’t even know how many hours I have spent on this in November - diagnosing problems, copying files, visiting the Apple Store, etc. It may be more than 100 hours in November. It has had a toll on both my personal and work responsibilities this month. This latest hard drive failure will likely result in the loss of 20 or 30 irreplaceable photos and about 4-6 hours of work. I probably won’t get my computer back until Thursday or Friday.

What amazes me about this experience is that Apple just replaced the faulty hard drive and here it fails. My first thought was that Apple didn’t replace the drive at all, but not only was the drive clean, but I believe the drive manufacturer changed when looking in the Apple System Profiler.

I remain an Apple fan, but I am starting to be persuaded that purchasing the first generation of an Apple product is probably a bad idea (I say this and then I look forward to purchasing an Apple phone, if it comes to pass). This is not my only bad experience as an early adopter.

UPDATE 1: 11/27/06: The Albuquerque Apple Store did not have a 120GB replacement drive in stock for an in-store repair, so my computer is off to the repair depot in Houston, Texas. I expect to get it back on Thursday or Friday. *sigh*

UPDATE 2: 11/30/06: My repaired MacBook Pro was delivered by DHL this morning…with a new hard drive. Another 4+ hours expected on data transfer, updates, etc.

UPDATE 3: 01/03/07: Everyone - it died again this weekend, on the way to a funeral sadly enough. The one-month old hard drive is clicking and I get the flashing question mark again. I did not make a backup since my last hard drive replacement and have lost a month of work, vacation photos, and email. I’m going to send the drive off to a data recovery service. I’m on the phone with Apple now trying to get this resolved. This situation is absurd. I’ll post a blog entry about this later.

Is email worth it?

SPAM is getting worse, much worse. I just pruned my SPAM folder (going back to February 2006) and had over 68,000 emails. I spent several hours looking for real emails via keywords. I found about 20 emails that were legitimate. Was it worth the effort? Probably not. Most of the messages were order confirmations, but there were a few from family members that were nice to recover.

I have had the same email address, raven@rinzai.com, since 1995. I don’t bother using the tricks to obfuscate the email address for web robots anymore because I was an active poster to USENET during the early to mid 90’s and those records are forever searchable on Google Groups. My email address is everywhere for SPAM purveyors to harvest.

I have considered changing my email address, but this is only a temporary solution (at some point, the SPAM will build up again), and it makes it difficult to stay in touch with old friends. There is a tremendous convenience that comes with having the same email address for life. I’d rather hold out for some technology solution that makes SPAM manageable, but that may take some time. I’ve been waiting for a decade now - will I have to wait another decade?

Maybe the solution is to just abandon email. I am envious of Umberto Eco, who has stated: “I don’t even have an e-mail address. I have reached an age where my main purpose is not to receive messages.” An interesting thought.

Email is a burden in many ways. Most people know that the best way to reach me is by phone or IM - two communications technologies that are less prone to commercial abuse. I do worry about the future of IM, but so far, so good!

That said, I do appreciate receiving my brother’s travel journals, links to photos, forwarded news stories, notes from family and friends, and the like. It’s just impossible to keep up with the quantity, all while managing the SPAM.

Goodbye, moblog!

I am retiring my moblog hosted at Blogger. Why? Flickr is working just great from my phone, thank to ShoZu. The built-in Blogger integration on my Sony Ericsson K790a phone isn’t any better than using the ShoZu client to upload directly to Flickr. It is a pain uploading to two places and Flickr is the better user experience.

Duduk Mind, Beginner’s Mind

My duduk arrived today. I’ve been entranced by this instrument since I first saw the film, “The Last Temptation of Christ,” more than fifteen years ago (the soundtrack by Peter Gabriel includes a duduk in the opening track.) The duduk has been a favored instrument for television and film scoring recently, gaining even greater exposure in the western world. This Armenian double reed aerophone is reminiscent of the oboe, and has a haunting, almost choral quality to it.

During these past fifteen or so years, I have wanted to learn how to play the duduk, but was satisfied by simply collecting duduk music, especially the works of Djivan Gasparyan, the most well-known of the duduk players living today.

Last week, I decided that it was time to learn how to play the duduk, and I am now just today at the beginning of this long learning process. I received my duduk today from duduk.com (seriously), along with some instructional videos, and a fascinating academic text on the role that the duduk plays in the Armenian national identity. While there is no duduk instructor in Portland, I have found someone in the Bay Area and hope to schedule lessons while I am there on business.

My experiences learning the duduk will likely be a regular topic on this blog. In those moments when I am able to transfer my love of music from passively listening to actively playing, I am most in synch with the world.

My four-day ordeal with 10.4.8

Since Saturday morning, I have been without a computer. I upgraded my MacBook Pro to Mac OS X 10.4.8 and after rebooting, I had a kernel panic. I rebooted again - another kernel panic. I was hosed. During the weekend, I tried various reinstallation techniques, but my install DVD kept hanging at various parts of the application installation process (first iWeb, then GarageBand, then iMovie, etc.). After searching the discussion forums, I discovered that I was not the only person with this problem. By Sunday night, I had tried ten variations of the reinstall - all failed. It seems as though the MacBook Pro install disk 2 (the one with the applications), does not like to install over the top of an existing system, even if you move the Applications folder out of the way. I tried and tried - no luck. This is not good news if it happens again before Mac OS X 10.5 is released.

Monday morning, I camped out at the Apple Store. My solution? Buy a Mac OS X 10.4 install DVD since I suspected that my installer DVD was bad. The problem is, Apple doesn’t sell Mac OS X 10.4 for Intel Macs because every Intel Mac has shipped with Mac OS X 10.4! This all lead to the dreaded final option - backup the data, format, reinstall, and copy the data back. With a 120GB internal drive in the MacBook Pro, this means hours and hours and hours of work. As I already spent hours and hours and hours over the weekend trying to reinstall, this made the process even more painful.

So, I bought a 500GB external hard disk, and connected it to my kids’ iMac along with my MacBook Pro in target disk mode. Copying over 100GB of data off my MacBook Pro took forever due in large part to copy failures thanks to corrupt and/or locked files. I’d have to identify the problem files, remove them, and start again. Hours and hours were lost throughout Monday as I sat in front of a computer and stared at the screen, waiting for the copy to fail, and for me to identify the problem files before starting the process all over again. My Monday night, I had finally backed up my data and I was ready to format and start over. By 2am early Tuesday morning, my MacBook Pro was operational again, and I have spent all morning (after a short night’s sleep) copying my data back to my MacBook Pro.

Total time spent recovering over four days: 28 hours. I am not kidding. Had I given up the reinstall on Sunday and had jumped right into backup and format mode, it would have only been a total of 18 or so hours. By the way - 10.4.8 installed just fine the second time. I have no idea what caused the problem in the first place. I blame no one. It happens. It still sucks, though.

I need your vote!

It’s voting time for My Dream App. You are allowed to vote for up to 14 of the 24 ideas on the list. First round voting ends on Friday and the bottom six will be eliminated before entering the next round. I need your vote. That is, if course, if you like my idea.

VOTE NOW!

I have a dream…app.

Three weeks ago , I visited My Dream App, and submitted three application ideas for the contest. Over 2,700 ideas were submitted by a thousand or more people from around the world and I was one of lucky 24 to be selected as a finalist. My selection was announced today. From here on out, there is a multi-round elimination process with public voting, akin to American Idol. To learn more about the contest, take a look at the about page. I am excited!

You can read about my idea, Telepath, here and my first blog entry on the MyDreamApp blog here has even more details.

Why did Apple pre-announce the iTV?

If you don’t know what the Apple ‘iTV’ is, take a look at the Engadget posting: Hands-on with the Apple iTV prototype.

Steve Jobs at the ‘It’s Showtime’ event: “But there is one last thing that I’d like to talk to you about today. Now this next thing is a little unusual for us. It’s a sneak peak of a product that will be announced in the first calendar quarter of 2007. We usually keep things pretty corralled until we’re ready to ship them but in this case, I think it completes the story and to understand where we’re going I’d like you to get a sneak peak of this. So we decided to go ahead and show it to you today.”

My Translation: “Guys - you know that we never, never, never, pre-announce products. There is an important reason why I am doing this today. You see, I’m having a tough time getting the major studios to buy-in to our online movie pricing plan. They have this notion that an online movie should cost almost the same as a DVD, which is totally bogus. They see digital movie sales as an opportunity to increase their margins, and it wouldn’t surprise me if the big DVD sellers like WalMart and Target are putting pressure on them. CD sales are way down - we’re already the fifth largest seller of music, regardless of the distribution format! The reason that Amazon was able to launch with everbody, basically, is their pricing structure. Go take a look at it and tell me why the !@#$ you’d buy a digital movie from Amazon for almost the same price as a DVD from WalMart? Plus, have you checked out their user experience? Boy, does it suck. And, it’s Windows only, don’t forget about that. The way to get the major studios back to the table and accept our consumer-friendly terms is to expose our movie product roadmap to the public, and get the consumers on our side. The major studios will come around, just you wait and see! Why would you buy movies anywhere else with the tight integration between your computer, your iPod, and soon - your television? We’re going to achieve market dominance with movies, just as we have with music and television programs. Get out there and talk up the iTV and make it known that you want to buy movies from us. Then, and only then will you be able to buy ‘Failure to Launch’ for less than $16.87 online! We’ll see if it’s even worth $9.99 - I have my doubts. By the way - you know, we’re going to have to pre-announce our iPhone next year, as well, because of the damn FCC filing period.”

BarCamp Portland is coming!

Ok, one of the things I do poorly is personal blogging. With my open source blog, 451 CAOS Theory, it’s part of my job responsibilities. I make the time. With my moblog, Raven in Flight, I can post entries on the go with little effort. Rinzai suffers. Someday…someday…Anyway, I digress…This is just the explanation as to why I haven’t posted anything here yet about BarCamp Portland.

BarCamp Portland is coming! If you’re in Portland or nearby and have any interest in participating (or even organizing), please check out the site, and add you name to the campers list. Thanks to Dawn Foster at Open Culture for posting something about this today.