Apathetic Thursday

WordPress Updated.

New WordPress Update… I have far too many blogs…

Another MacHeist… timing on these things is terrible…

Contemplating Monotony… …more coming later…

Merry Christmas All!

Just beat Metroid Prime 3! Watching credits now… … …

Heinz Ketchup recently sponsored an event where people could create their own ketchup commercial and submit it to win a prize. I submitted this commercial created by me and my cousins: via YouTube

I didn’t make the top 15 finalists, which was somewhat disappointing because I felt that my work was better then some of the finalists, but a few of the finalists were amazingly done.

Today, my Dad came down stairs with a package for me from Heinz Ketchup. I figured it had to be from the commercial thing, I don’t have any other affiliation to this company that I know of.

The package contained a small little ketchup container with the phrase “Philip Topped This” on the label. Along with a note explaining that there is a second challenge taking place and as I submitted a commercial last time, they would like me to submit another one this time.

It looks like I’ll have a tasty commercial coming up in the next few weeks. Stay tuned!

Just got a package from Heinz Ketchup… blog posting to follow soon…

Going through old photos. Putting the good ones on flickr: http://flickr.com/landofchaos

Today has been a tech day for me. This morning I went to my Mom’s flower shop and installed Windows on her new 24 inch iMac (via Parallels) so that they can move their stuff over to the new machine. Sadly, my work there is not done because they need the computer to hook up to a phone line, so we needed to order a USB modem from Apple, and I’ll finish things up there in a few days when the part comes.

It was fun to play with parallels, but I must say, I’m liking the whole VNC system better. I believe this is for two reasons. A) I already have a PC running Windows and B) it doesn’t use up any of my laptop’s processing power.

When I got home from working on my mom’s computer, I grabbed our old 15″ iMac (the half-sphere kind) and (…it hadn’t moved from where I set it down a month ago, behind the couch…) and hooked it up to my external hard drive that has Tiger on it.

I booted it up into Tiger without a problem, which was a pleasant surprise. I then began to do a 7 pass secure erase of the hard drive. The iMac had (wait… past tense?) a 40 inch hard drive which was starting to get very loud at times. I wanted to try to help it find the bad sectors and make it all better. (I tried to do this a month ago with Jaguar, but the version of Jaguar I had didn’t support secure erase yet.)

Shortly into pass 2 of the 7 passes, the computer re-prompted me for a password (3 times, again, I might add) and then it said it failed with a in/out error. What’s more, after rebooting, the hard drive never even showed up.

I have a PC in my dorm room at school with 4 hard drives in it. One of which is a 40 gig hard drive, another is a 20 gig hard drive. Either of these would be perfect replacements for the iMac drive, which I am now assuming has died. However, I am closed out of the dorm for break, so I go down to my room and grab the 8 Gig hard drive sitting on my shelf.

I proceed to open the iMac and take it apart. I can’t tell you how much I have wanted to do that. Anyway, I get the iMac base off and realize that the internal RAM is different from the laptop-sized add-on RAM that was under the bottom panel. The laptop style RAM was 512MB, but the internal RAM was only 128MB. I quickly run down to my room and grab the pile of RAM I have in my closet and taking it back upstairs I find that I have a stick of 256MB which I can add to the machine.

I swap out the RAM easily and continue to disassemble the computer. I finally get the whole thing apart, take out the hard drive and put in the 8Gig drive. I carefully put everything back together and close up the machine.

I try booting up the machine, but it can’t find the new hard drive. I figure this is because there’s no operating system on the drive, and hook up my external again so the machine will boot.

The machine boots up and I open up Disk Utility… only to discover that the iMac doesn’t see a hard drive. Which means either this hard drive is just as bad as the last one… less likely. Or there is a bad connection somewhere on the cable that connects the hard drive… more likely. Or by some odd turn of fate I didn’t quite push the power cable into the drive as firmly as I needed to so it would work. (Hopefully not.)

However, all is not lost, because the iMac is now running off my Tiger Drive. (Which is my final backup with SuperDuper! before installing Leopard.) So I immediately connect my PowerBook to the iMac and fire up Chicken of the VNC, and I can now run Tiger and Leopard side by side, using my laptop to control them both. (Without much loss of processing power.)

I think I may take a break from electronics now and do some of the other things I should get done today.