DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

The time has finally come to upgrade this creaky MacOS 9.2.2 workstation to a modern, efficient, secure, feature-rich operating system: I’m switching to WinXP.

Heh. Pick up your jaw. I’m only kidding.

I am sorely past due for migrating to OS X (which I use and embrace on my laptop). Upgrade pain is acute in my case — I’m so thoroughly wedded to my particular collection of apps and utilities that any minor disruption could take weeks to overcome. And a few of the apps I rely on don’t exist for OS X, so I have to find uncomfortable replacements. Join me as I begin to bite this bullet, hopefully without blowing the back of my skull all over the wall.

1. Make backups: set up firewire drive, find Retrospect installer disk, find license key, install Retrospect, run backup, run backup again after reducing match criteria because archive was bigger than OS filesize limit (2gb), run four more backups with carefully-selected criteria to keep archive size down.
2. Update SCSI card firmware for OS X compatibility: decipher cryptic notes on vendor’s website, download latest utility, download latest firmware, act surprised when latest firmware package contains utility newer than “latest” utility downloaded separately, run utility to flash firmware, ignore configuration screen with about 75 incomprehensible parameter-tuning widgets in hopes that the defaults are OK.
3. Install new boot drive: find baggie of surplus machine screws that’s buried in the garage somewhere, remove drive sled from computer, mount new drive to sled, restore sled to computer, discover that the single remaining power cable won’t reach new drive. Pull on harness, cut cable tie, re-route many connectors, fiddle. Search in vain for 4'' extension cord that I know I have, somewhere. Re-route connectors again. Finally make everything fit. Close case.
4. Find Jaguar CDs, which haven’t been seen since last September: look at prominent place on shelf where other utility disks are kept, but find (for reasons I cannot explain) only the old Panther disks. Look in storage area under stairs where all remaining media is kept. Look in closet. Look through media box again. Search desk. Look through media box again. (Yes, I am a George Carlin comedy sketch.) Finally find Panther disks in box of ancient audio CDs moved from the living room because we never play them any more.
5. Install Panther: Format new disk with Disk Utility; see error message that system can’t boot from new drive and therefore OS can’t be installed, re-partition new drive, see error again, call Apple, explain problem, learn that OS X drive has to be “primary” ATA drive. Pull both drives from case, look up jumper configuration on vendor website, reset master/slave jumpers, reinstall drives, re-attach power cables. Re-run installer. Act nonchalant when it works. After all, why wouldn’t it work?

For most people, the above would describe an afternoon that, if not exactly pleasant, at least resulted in success. But I have complex needs, or at least a complex configuration, so I was only beginning.

My OS 9 system had three logical drives: an ATA boot drive, a SCSI RAID-1 (striped) drive for applications, a SCSI RAID-0 (mirrored) drive for data. I’d need to upgrade the RAID drivers for OS X. The process can’t be reversed.

The striped array came right up. The mirrored array — the one with five years’ worth of data — did not. Sigh.

I shot an email to the vendor. I know they work weekends because they’ve bailed me out once before, when a previous upgrade went awry.

And then I addressed the next critical phase of any OS X upgrade: setting up cute desktop icons.

BTW, OS X kicks ass. Don’t mistake my tale of woe for a general gripe about Apple or even about the third-party RAID software I’m using. I wish computers were easier to set up, but I recognize that I push mine harder than most people.

I attended a panel discussion on “Blogging and Social Networking” tonight.

One of the panelists (I didn’t note who) declared that “journalism is dead.” I read the paper every day, so I can’t say I agree, but it made a nice soundbite, a nice affirmation for anyone whose living depends on whatever thing has been crowned the “new journalism.” The evidence cited: media consolidation results in a loss of perspective, a loss of fair coverage, and a homogeneity of interpretation; scandals like Jayson Blair undermine the credibility of even the most revered news sources.

The proposed solution — of course! — is blogging. Therefore you should immediately cease reading Google News, the Tribune, the Chronicles and Timeses and Heralds of the world, and rely solely on debris.com for all your news. Thank you.

Blogs are unfiltered. There’s no newsroom bias, no editor squashing stories that would offend an advertiser or board member or President. The implication: blogs are more honest.

Also, most blogs (erm, not this one) have a feedback loop — an opportunity for readers to comment on stories. One of the panelists suggested that had the NY Times provided a commenting feature, Jayson Blair would have been accused and outed long before he’d managed to fabricate 30+ stories.

Jason Calcalis challenged Dan Gilmor with this question: assuming compensation and benefits were equal, wouldn’t you rather be a full-time blogger than a newspaper columnist with a blog on the side? Gilmor’s answer surprised me, and probably most everybody in the room: he said no. He said he already has total journalistic freedom. And he admitted that being on staff at the Merc has brought lots of traffic to his blog. I appreciated that turnaround — not only is he not eager to abandon his newspaper column… he relies on it to drive readers to his blog.

Gilmor made another interesting point. He described blogs as the first realization of Tim Berners-Lee’s original vision of an interactive web. Until blogs, the web was a read-only medium. With blogs, it has become read-write. (Except at debris.com. But, hey, you can send me email if you like.)

Mark Pincus was asked about his ownership of the sixdegrees social-networking patent. He claimed he’d purchased the patent, in partnership with Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn, to prevent other companies from using it to restrict competition. He didn’t name names, but there seemed to be some tension among the panelists.

I have to believe there will be some lawsuits around this before very long. Consolidation is inevitable. Nobody wants to have to maintain profiles and networks at, let’s see, Friendster, LinkedIn, Tribe, Orkut, Ryze, Spoke, ZeroDegrees, Ecademy, RealContacts, Ringo, MySpace, Yafro, EveryonesConnected, Friendzy, FriendSurfer, Tickle, Evite, Plaxo, Squiby, and WhizSpark. And for all the talk (during this panel) of open vs. closed networks, does anybody really believe all the industry leaders will embrace open standards so that users can export profile and network information to ease migration into a competing network? I don’t see it.

I was disappointed to see Jason Kottke abandon his goal for the year. He writes that what initially sounded like a fun project became more like a second job, and lost its appeal thereby.

Oh, do I know what he means. I set several aggressive goals for the year. Now half the year is up, and I’ve accomplished only one.

But, it was the best one.

The goal was to perform on stage, preferably with a few other musicians around me to distract the audience somewhat. (In all my music career, I believe I’ve played two drum solos, and only one of them was intentional. The other one happened at my wedding — I got talked into playing Wipeout without realizing that everybody would naturally conclude I was really enjoying performing a monotonous, cliched drum feature at my own reception.) So it’s a good thing I managed to join a band before the deadline on this goal came up.

We played at an open-mic night last month — a 25-minute set, including an unexpected encore.

Speaking of unexpected encores, I’ll be doubling up on this goal in a few more weeks. My band will be performing two sets in the square, downtown Sebastopol, on Thursday August 6, part of the summer concert series. Bring a blanket, a burrito, and a beer for the drummer. I promise I won’t play Wipeout.

This made the rounds in April, but I missed out because I read other websites about as often as I listen to the radio. Fortunately my friend Chuck is a big Nickelback fan. (Heh, just kidding, Chuck. Now put down that knife.)

I’ll leave the explanation to Brandon from nintendorks.com:

It’s probably no surprise that I don’t enjoy “popular” or “Top 40” music. It’s corporate, bland, overplayed, unoriginal, boring, bland, and boring, It’s also dumb. But just because I don’t enjoy it doesn’t mean I don’t listen to it. I mean, how can you not when radio and TV is infested with this crap. Lately, one of the bands that I love to hate is Nickelback, slowly climbing the ranks and placing themselves up at the top with Creed, Matchbox 20, and countless others as “worst bands in the history of music.”

So I received tremendous joy when I found the following file over on the SA Forums. Some internet genius took Nickelback’s first horrible “hit,” and mixed it with Nickelback’s newest awful “hit.” By “mixed” I mean one shitty song plays in the left speaker, and the other ear-bleeding excuse for rock plays in the right speaker. What a surprise, they are almost EXACTLY THE SAME. It’s uncanny, sad, and hilarious at the same time.

Here’s the combined song: You Remind Me of Someday

I was honestly shocked at how good these songs sounded together. Both songs hit the chorus at the same time. The tempos are the same. Even the second chorus comes at the same time. It’s formula rock at its best! Or worst, depending.

I dug deeper. I needed to know if the person behind this mix altered the sources. Maybe he’s a Creed fanboy trying to discredit Nickelback?

I found that the songs were altered slightly. “Someday” is slower, about 82 bpm, whereas “Remind Me” taps out at about 89 bpm. The combination sits somewhere in the middle.

But in the end it doesn’t affect the conclusion that is immediately apparent to anybody with ears. A tempo change is irrelevant; the arrangements are identical. Even the cliches are repeated. Here’s what I found, comparing the originals:

*I guess I’d better pull that prechorus build out of Ode to Soup!

For more analysis and discussion of other bands that either suck or are comprised entirely of visionaries and geniuses, see the MetaFilter thread.

My RealAge is 29.3. (Link to realage.com removed; see warning below.)

I wish my real age, by which I mean my, err, real age, were only 29.3. I haven’t been that young for about eight years.

The RealAge.com site offers an extensive questionnaire that attempts to calculate a person’s life expectancy based on health and lifestyle choices. Years of “RealAge” are added or subtracted to one’s calendar age based on factors such as smoking, exercise, and diet.

For example, taking antioxidant vitamins like C and E daily is worth one year of RealAge, presumably because vitamin-takers live a bit longer than non-vitamin takers.

Curiously, the “annual family income” question appears to have no bearing on one’s RealAge. I guess they’ve snuck a few marketing-research / customer qualification items into the health questionnaire.

Another quirk of the tool is that there’s no apparent penalty for habitually lying about the state of one’s health. (Really, I drink cod liver oil every day!)

The site provides a personalized plan for improving one’s health, based on the questionnaire responses where one comes up a bit shorter than ideal. There is also a nice set of 12 common-sense tips for living longer, for people who don’t take the time for the full analysis because they’re too stressed out about some damn arbitrary deadline or other, itself worth minus multiple years of one’s life.

Warning! On December 3, 2004, I began receiving multiple spam emails per day to the email address I submitted to RealAge. The evidence suggests that RealAge sold or rented its mailing list to bulk-mail-house asandox.com. I can no longer promote nor recommend RealAge’s service. It’s possible, but unlikely, that I knowingly opted in to any sort of promotional program; the sudden appearance of unsolicited marketing materials suggests that RealAge has changed my contact preferences without my consent.