August 2008 Archives
If you are ever curious to what the world is looking for on any given day, go visit Google Trends where you can see the top 100 search topics.
With the VP announcement yesterday, almost a quarter of those 100 topics were related to Sarah Palin. Her Google "hotness rating" quickly hit Volcanic.
Today (Saturday of Labor Day weekend) she was quickly pushed to the back of the bus. The hottest topics of the day are "notre dame schedule", "penn state schedule", "georgia bulldog schedule" and the like.
As fascinating as this election has been this summer, America is moving on to something more serious for Fall: College Football.
The Sarah Palin VP announcement has created a lot of buzz in the house. This morning, Kathy pulled up this photo of a *recent* cover shot from Vogue. This is not a spoof. (Debunked by Ted.)
Dick Cheney never made Vogue. Which makes me think of Cheney's hunting accident. Since Palin would often wake up at 3 a.m. to go moose hunting with her dad, I bet she is a better shot than Cheney.
Palin's favorite food is Moose Stew.
This race was interesting, but it just got fascinating.
A poem by my sister.
I went to the mailbox and what did I see?
My brother Jeb sent a DVD!
What a surprise, what a treat!
I ran inside and took a seat.
I stuck that disk into my laptop.
I started watching and could not stop!
The people the scenery, the pictures of Dad,
It made me feel happy, joyful, and sad.
I thought to myself, "that Jeb's a great guy"
I'm happy to know him and if you ask me why,
I'll tell you he's funny, he's charming and wise
he's a sensitive, creative, original guy!
If you get to see him one day soon
tell him he's more fun than a big red balloon.
For many years, we have had "free" ISDN then DSL access thanks to IBM. Alas, that relationship is coming to an end, so we're having to pay for internet access for the first time. Taking this speed test of our DSCGA service so I can benchmark the new AT&T/Bellsouth service, which is supposed to be 2 to 3 times faster. (So we can all watch YouTube's at the same time.)
File size transferred : 10.0 MB (10485760 bytes)
Total time taken : 69.79 seconds (69794 milliseconds)
Throughput : 150.0 KB/sec [Kilobyte-per-second]
= 0.15 MB/sec [Megabyte-per-second]
= 1200.0 Kbps [Kilobit-per-second]
= 1.2 Mbps [Megabit-per-second]
Update 9/2:
AT&T FastAccess DSL self install kit arrived. Higher speed over the same wires...
File size transferred : 10.0 MB (10485760 bytes)
Total time taken : 29.15 seconds (29145 milliseconds)
Throughput : 359.0 KB/sec [Kilobyte-per-second]
= 0.36 MB/sec [Megabyte-per-second]
= 2872.0 Kbps [Kilobit-per-second]
= 2.87 Mbps [Megabit-per-second]
Testing the use of Publishing Queue. Instead of posting upon save, I've enabled this setting to post on schedule. This means my save experience is quicker, but it also enables Brandon Fuller's Twitter plug-in I'm testing.
Claire inserted her new Jonas Brothers CD into our iMac 20, and it would not show up nor would it eject. I tried all the tricks I could find on the internet to get it to eject: eject key, iTunes eject, reboot holding down mouse button, typing a terminal command. I could hear the disk spinning and even feel it with a driver's license, but it would not come out.
Shut it down overnight to see if cooling would help, but that did nothing. Made an appointment with the Apple Store "Genius Bar" over the internet to take it in. Just before I packed it up in the original box, I pressed the eject button on the keyboard, and the Jonas Brothers popped out! (Or their CD, anyway.) I tried putting it and other CDs back in, but none would show up. I could at least eject them. Off to the Genius Bar.
Of course it worked fine as the Apple Genius tried CDs and DVDs in the Apple Store. So he decided to call it intermittent superdrive failure, and change it out for free. (Still under the 1 year warranty.) Kathy and I went to pick it up Saturday, having dinner at the food court.
It turns out replacing the superdrive did not solve the problem, so they replaced the entire logic board (which is basically the computer.) The whole tab was over $1,000 between parts and labor. The logic board alone is $650.
Looking at the system profile under "Disc Burning", I got a message "No device is attached." Ack! That was a symptom before the fix. But I put in a CD, it started playing, and looking back under system profile I saw what I expected. So who knows. I'll probably end up buying an extended warranty, which I've never done.
MATSHITA DVD-R UJ-85J:
Firmware Revision: FM0S
Interconnect: ATAPI
Burn Support: Yes (Apple Shipping Drive)
Cache: 2048 KB
Reads DVD: Yes
CD-Write: -R, -RW
DVD-Write: -R, -R DL, -RW, +R, +R DL, +RW
Write Strategies: CD-TAO, CD-SAO, DVD-DAO
Media:
Type: CD-ROM
Blank: No
Erasable: No
Overwritable: No
Appendable: No
