Cocoa Crusty

I’m thinking that I’m so screwed up right now because I don’t have any sort of physical activity in my life, therefore, my blood doesn’t flow to all the vital parts of my being. This may be why I continue to make bad decisions… My blood is starving for oxygen and blood flow…

Yesterday, I walked 1.46 miles in just over 22 minutes. It felt good to walk, if only for the discipline factor… Using my Nike+ gear does help. I like gadgets and this helps encourage me to walk/run. I like the fact that I can visualize my walks/runs (no running yet, that’ll be in a few weeks). It also gives me stats as to how many calories I burn, my average pace (which is slow), etc.

Below is an updated “widget” that shows my last run stats. There is also a link to my last walk. Enjoy… I’m a loser!

Yesterday’s Walk… BTW, my pace is far from consistent…

Until next time…

Well, I have recently reentered the 200+ club… Today I weighed in at 202.3 pounds… I have been feeling a little trashy… Not so much about my physical appearance, which is rough in itself, but just physically blah… I knew it was time for a change.

I had heard about the whole collaboration between Nike and Apple where you can put this nifty little device in your shoe, have it wirelessly transmit to an Apple iPod Nano, and then report your results from your walks/runs to the Nike+ Web site…

The Nike+ Web site allows you to keep track of your runs: the distance, time, calories burned, etc. It also lets you set goals for yourself and also provides training through pre-configured workout plans. Well, being the techie that I am, and the bigness that I sport, I decided to give this stuff a try.

Today was my first WALK and my first bit of exercise in quite sometime… I broke a sweat, my legs burned at first, but overall I really enjoyed it… My stats will constantly be updated in the block below. You can laugh and it won’t even hurt my feelings… But, and I do mean but, keep in mind that I still currently smoke a pack a day… which I hope to quit soon… I’ve already started eating grilled chicken wraps or grilled chicken salads pretty regularly… Anyway, that’s me…

Until next time…

I woke up yesterday to my Apple TV not working quite right with content that wasn’t stored on the Apple TV’s local hard drive. I had a bridal shoot to do for my Fruitful Studios gig so I didn’t really have much time to do any troubleshooting.

The shoot started at my house using my portable studio/backdrop. Before we headed downtown I decided to take a look at my MacBook to see what was going on. The laptop’s screen was gray… Hmmm… I held down the power button and the system shut down. I pressed the power button again and on the laptop came, taking forever to bring the Apple logo up and the process gear.

When the logo and gear did show up, it was on the screen forever. I repeated the nifty little power off, power on routine several times and had the same results. By this time, it was time for me to head out with the bride to be and do some more shooting. I left the laptop on while I was gone with the Apple logo and gear displayed and the gear was just a spinning…

When I got back from the shoot, my laptop screen had the lovely logon dialog box on it with my blue background! Praise God!!! w00t! And all that… But, when I tried to logon, the “beach ball” just spun and never did anything. At this point, I noticed the wonderful sound of metal on metal grinding… Any techie probably can guess what that meant…

I tried the whole power off and power on thing a few more times until I finally got a different image on the grey background instead of the Apple logo: it was a nifty folder icon with a question mark on it… Any Mac fans care to guess what this means? That’s right, kids. The system can’t find a bootable system partition… Great fun! My hard drive is trash!!!

That’s right. The Hitachi Travelstar™ (Model: HTS541616J9SA00) 160GB, 5400RPM hard drive I had in my MacBook bit it… hard! Thankfully, I backup all of my critical data, but one thing I don’t backup is my Applications folder… Crap!

I purchased a 320GB Western Digital (Part number goes here when I can find the box) drive from Best Buy, slapped it in, and started the rebuilding process… This could take a while… From now on, I will be using the Time Machine feature built-in to Leopard… Time Machine supposedly backups all data on your Mac, making it extremely simple to restore a machine easily and quickly…

Hopefully, I won’t have any more hard drive failures, but if I do, maybe Time Machine can save the day…

Until next time…

Well, the upgrade to Mac OS X Leopard went smoothly, as Wooley predicted in his comment on my previous post.

The whole upgrade took about an hour and 15 minutes (which included verifying the install DVD) on my MacBook. I now am running the latest and greatest version of Apple’s OS, a certified flavor of UNIX, and am, so far, extremely impressed. The dock is beautiful, Stacks look extremely useful and efficient, there are a lot of desktop customizable features, Spaces (which I am looking forward to setting up soon), and more.

I look forward to getting a bit more intimate better acquainted with Leopard in the upcoming days and months. Anyway, the upgrade went smoothly. If you’re scared, don’t be. Mine was a breeze! I just wish I had upgraded the day this package arrived on my doorstep…

uname Output:

% uname -a
Darwin xbook 9.0.0 Darwin Kernel Version 9.0.0: Tue Oct 9 21:35:55 PDT 2007; root:xnu-1228~1/RELEASE_I386 i386

Until next time…

I have had Apple’s latest release of Mac OS X, Leopard, since it launched a couple of weeks ago. I used my in-store credit from my iPhone purchase reimbursement from when I purchased my iPhone 45 days too early for the price drop… or something… Anyway, I got Leopard and tonight I’m gonna install it!

Backups are running as we speak… I’m jonesing as we speak… I’m ready to install this new OS!!!! I’ll let you know how it goes…

Until next time…