Saint Joan and the well-past-warranty blues
June 27, 2008 4 Comments
Anyone who tried to read this blog in the past 2 or 3 days either found it down or found it upside down.
Black Bloke left a comment asking, “Why did posts from early 2007 suddenly come up on my RSS Reader?”
Fair question, not least because he’d just left another comment making an interesting point about how “in the context of an empire a nationalist of the ruled people can have a philosophy that is pro-liberty and decentralist, but a nationalist of the ruling people will be entirely the opposite.”
He left these comments on my January 2007 post on nationalism: “Le Pen versus Joan of Arc”
Sorry for the absence and subsequent confusion, folks. The hard drive on my web server died, but it died slowly, so I spent a lot of time troubleshooting and attempting to fix via software what ultimately turned out to be a hardware issue. Only when I figured that out did I get a temporary substitute up and running instead, and when I did that, everything came up in “ascending” chronological order: old before new, just the opposite of what everyone is used to. That turned out to be the very weird result of an incompatibility between old blog software and new database — or maybe it was the other way around. Anyway, it was all fixed by updating everything: latest MySQL, latest PHP, and latest WordPress, all running on a defunct powerbook laptop (defunct as a laptop because half the pixels on the monitor are purple! but not defunct, it turns out, as a web server).
We’ve had terrible, terrible luck with computers in the Marcus household this month. Of the 3 computers in use, all 3 broke in some way: aforementioned purple pixels (corrupt VRAM); aforementioned dead hard drive; and my wife’s optical drive stopped working, too. I haven’t been elbow deep in technology problems in quite a while. It’s fun, if you ignore the time, money, and stress involved.
Thanks for the explanation (and the link!) B. K. :-)
I suppose today’s as good a time as any to consider the new Mac Book Pros that are supposedly coming out in a little while. I know I sure am.
The MacRumors buyer’s guide tracks average duration between releases for each Apple product; the assumption being that product releases occur on a somewhat fixed schedule.
http://buyersguide.macrumors.com/
Interesting reading, even if the theory isn’t necessarily supported by the evidence.
The Buyer’s Guide only works to an extent. I’m beginning to rely on Intel’s chip delivery. Some new laptop ready chip is coming this summer (I’m not sure whether it’s a tick or a tock), and this is what leads us to believe that Apple will have out some new laptop.
Hopefully one redesigned along the lines of the MacBook Air :-)
That barber must be dense not to question why a young boy keeps walking into his shop.