Dustrhino isn’t selling out, well sort of. I’m doing some experimenting with Google AdSense ads for a work project, and thought was as good a place as any, since dustrhino.com receives at least a modest amount of traffic, though I suspect most of it is from botnets of zombie windows desktops, and servers from the wilds of Eastern Europe. If he have any human readers out there, leave us a comment, and let us know.
Over at DesignHammer, we seem to have learned of the hilarious ”The Website Is Down” (a.k.a. Sales Guy vs Web Dude) video before it took off, and ironically, brought the hosting website down.
If you are one of the few in IT who haven’t caught the tale of a hapless web developer whose job-time Halo games and job search are constantly interrupted by bozo colleagues and clients, and was as naive managers, check it out. Even if you are not in IT, it is really funny—just have someone explain some of the more technical humor to get the most from it. Suzanne thought it was funny enough to watch over and over again.
I had what must be the worst birthday ever yesterday—the hard drive in my PowerBook decided to die yesterday morning. Well, not die completely, in the words of Miracle Max, it was only “mostly dead.”
Miracle Max: See, there’s a big difference between mostly dead, and all dead. Now, mostly dead: he’s slightly alive. All dead, well, with all dead, there’s usually only one thing that you can do.
Inigo: What’s that?
Miracle Max: Go through his clothes and look for loose change.
Since the drive was only mostly dead, with much coaxing, I was able to pull 10GB of data that was more recent than my last backup. I was able to buy a new drive and install it in my PowerBook, and get it up and running again by about midnight. I am still installing applications, but I was able to get back to productive work this morning, with only one day lost. It could have been much worse…
The irony, of course, is I decided a few weeks ago to start doing full drive clones (after a close call with Suzanne’s PowerBook), to allow for restoring all of the files from a failed drive, including the OS and applications, and the JBOD case and drives arrived—you guessed it—yesterday morning about an hour after the drive failed. More details on the hardware and software solution in the near future.
What made things worse is the drive I was using for my backups was full of files from Suzanne’s computer, in case what we thought was the cause of her problem (a bad RAM module) was only another symptom of a greater issue.
And, as a warning to everyone out there depending on the drive’s embedded S.M.A.R.T. (Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology) to provide an early warning before a drive failre, my “mostly dead” drive that abosultely does not work correctly does not report any problems. You have been warned.
At Macworld in San Francisco this morning, CEO Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone, a breakthrough convergence device that sports the features of a widescreen ipod, mobile phone, and portable Internet device. The seemingly amazing device is similar in shape to a iPod Nano (using either 4GB or 8GB of flash memory), except with a screen covering nearly the full face of the device, and only a single hardware button. It seems, it doesn’t need any other buttons, since the entire screen is touch-sensitive, and it has a number of sensors to determine what you are doing, including motion and ambient light. It is amazing in action—check out these videos of placing a call, checking voicemail, listening to music, and watching a video.
The only downsides are it isn’t cheap ($500, and $600 models), and won’t be available until June. I have not really lusted after a techno gizmo in a while, but I want one. Too bad, my birthday is coming up, and it would have made a great gift.
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