It's in the way that you use it

Or so Eric Clapton sings as Paul Newman and Tom Cruise smack pool balls around "The Color of Money."

All two of you who read this blog have probably read my last two posts complaining about Apple and their seemingly nonchalant ways to fix a pretty serious problem. In fact, 25 pages and some 44,000 views later on the EFI Firmware thread over at the Apple Forums still nothing has been done.

It's in the way that you use it. That's why the problem has come about. Everybody who has solved their problem without help from Apple seem to be mostly PC users also. Although it has been solved, the computer hardware will not be running at its full potential. The hardware has to be crippled to operate effectively on the Mac side of the dual boot set up.

We PC users are not afraid to crack the case and get our hands dirty. We don't use computers like the typical apple customer. The typical apple customer buys a Mac and uses it straight out of the box because of how easy it is to use. They (mostly) use it for email, surfing, design and liberal blogging. Careful not to spill your triple-half-caf-grande-chocolate-decaf-with-a-dash-of-smugness on your keyboard while you are extolling the virtues of universal health care.

PC users... We're power users. We've learned from day one how to crack open the case of our computers and swap video cards, set jumpers, install more memory and essentially raise the computer from the dead. True all we have is windows but that's half the fun. We tweak settings until the wee hours of the night just so we can run freakin' solitaire. We suffer for our technology and have paid that debt with scrathced knuckles and sweaty ears due to hours on the phone with tech support.

The point is, being a non-Luddite and not afraid to "do stuff that might void the warranty" I want to hot rod my new MBP (Mac Book Pro) to make it mine and not like every other Mac owner out there. I'm not afraid of the inner workings. But to punish me because you [Apple] screwed over tens of thousands of users for wanting to soup up our machines so we can use them the way we want. "We don't support third party drives" BS I cry! The drive I bought to replace the one it came with happened to be the exact same Manufaturer and model as the one I pulled out. It was just bigger. Sucks to you. I don't want to be like every other fan boy out there and say "Well, that's okay I'll just wait til they fix it I love Apple and Steve Jobs It's so easy blah blah blah." Even the "genious," so called, in the Apple store gave me wrong information about using bootcamp. Tool.

I want to like it. I really do. I want to do some iPhone development. That's one of the reasons I got it. I also like the unibody design. I like the ability to have both OS's available at any given time. That's helpful being a musician and developer. Plus now I don't have to re-purchase all of my software.

That being said after about a week of reading posts and what not my FrankenBook is back. The hardware is not living up to its potential but that's not my fault. Those are the parameters I have to operate under until a certain fruit company wakes up and smells the tofu. I boot straight into windows and rarely see the Apple side. That's the way I roll.

Screw you, Jobu. I fix it myself!

So after much ado, My mac is back up and running. It took some digging and whatnot and I had to get this snazzy utility from the Hitachi web site that is DOS based only. It will boot youe intel Mac up but the keyboard won't work. Steve Jobs owes me about 700 bucks for all the time I spent troubleshooting and solving Apple's problem for them. Actually me and another dude on the Mac forum. He found the link to the Hitachi site. Go dude.

So here are the steps I took: 1. Left the offending drive in my MBP formatted as a Mac Drive 2. Booted to my "old" 250 gig drive that originally came with the system that I put in an external enclosure via USB. 3. Used Carbon Copy Cloner to clone my "old" drive to the offending drive since the OS recognized the offending drive and it could be written to. 4. Went to see Transformers 2 (optional) 5. Pulled offending drive out of the MBP and hooked it up to my PC. 6. Ran the Hitachi "Set my drive to 1.5 GBPS cripple" utility. 7. Put Offending drive back in MBP. 8. Booted up fine. 9. Ran Xbench 10. Copy and pasted results here. Your mileage may vary. Results 106.99 System Info Xbench Version 1.3 System Version 10.5.7 (9J3050) Physical RAM 4096 MB Model MacBookPro5,4 Drive Type Hitachi HTS545050B9A300 CPU Test 168.17 GCD Loop 295.54 15.58 Mops/sec Floating Point Basic 142.42 3.38 Gflop/sec vecLib FFT 119.30 3.94 Gflop/sec Floating Point Library 200.07 34.84 Mops/sec Thread Test 308.16 Computation 450.50 9.13 Mops/sec, 4 threads Lock Contention 234.17 10.07 Mlocks/sec, 4 threads Memory Test 157.00 System 166.79 Allocate 224.10 822.98 Kalloc/sec Fill 142.60 6933.57 MB/sec Copy 153.57 3172.02 MB/sec Stream 148.30 Copy 142.28 2938.80 MB/sec Scale 138.04 2851.81 MB/sec Add 157.84 3362.28 MB/sec Triad 157.12 3361.10 MB/sec Quartz Graphics Test 141.78 Line 133.59 8.89 Klines/sec [50% alpha] Rectangle 165.98 49.55 Krects/sec [50% alpha] Circle 140.57 11.46 Kcircles/sec [50% alpha] Bezier 141.87 3.58 Kbeziers/sec [50% alpha] Text 131.71 8.24 Kchars/sec OpenGL Graphics Test 102.21 Spinning Squares 102.21 129.66 frames/sec User Interface Test 142.70 Elements 142.70 654.93 refresh/sec Disk Test 38.43 Sequential 99.94 Uncached Write 94.79 58.20 MB/sec [4K blocks] Uncached Write 108.14 61.18 MB/sec [256K blocks] Uncached Read 83.51 24.44 MB/sec [4K blocks] Uncached Read 121.16 60.90 MB/sec [256K blocks] Random 23.79 Uncached Write 7.60 0.80 MB/sec [4K blocks] Uncached Write 72.26 23.13 MB/sec [256K blocks] Uncached Read 67.55 0.48 MB/sec [4K blocks] Uncached Read 125.21 23.23 MB/sec [256K blocks]

Thanks for the Brick

Hey Apple,

Thanks for the latest EFI 1.7 firmware upgrade. It's turned a perfectly good computer computer into a useless brick. I hope you are working on a fix for it. I've spent several hours on the phone with tech support (very helpful) and an hour with a genius (so called) who was not helpful. I assume everyone is now fully aware of the problem. If not, look here:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2054387&start=0&tstart=0

I'm not the only one with this issue. Your lack of response on the boards is not very encouraging.

I bought a 500gig Hitachi drive to add to my MBP and all was well until the firmware update. How can you knowingly send something out like that knowing full well it would cause problems? Not only have I lost time but I lost several hours worth of work that I had done on the Windows side. I was dual booting and happy as could be until "the update."

Well bravo if you are working on a fix. Claiming not support 3rd party hard drives is BS. The Hitachi 500 gig drive I installed is the exact brand and model of the 250 gig drive that came with the MBP. You even have in your manual how to replace the computer's HD with another one. How was I supposed to know I had to put the "super secret custom Apple SATA crippling cross mojinator firmware" on my new drive before I installed it so your "update" would work?

I think it's time you own up to the deception and make it right. What would PC say in a commercial? He'd probably take Mac by the ankles and beat the VP who made this asinine decision with him. Way to deceive. Just fess up and fix the problem.

I want to like Macs. I like the idea of running multiple OSs on one machine but crap like this makes it hard. Fix it. Now.

I kow I need to lose weigh but these last 80 pounds are killing me

Usually that is a reserved statement for the last 5 or so pounds. I've decided it is time to whip my hiny into shape.

I aim to lose 80 pounds or maybe a little more over the next who knows how long. I think it would be cool to have a ripped 6 pack but in order to do that you have to have your body fat below 10% and that isn't really that healthy so I'll settle for for body fat somewhere below 20%.

I thought about it the other day. 80 pounds. That's 5 16 pound bowling balls at the bowling alley. That's like trying to carry both of my puppies at once. Seems like a long way to go from 255 but I know I can do it.

I'm thinking about blogging the process with the (ugh!) before picture and the (Damn!) after picture. Plus a few shots here and there in between. I'm hoping by doing that I can keep myself honest and motivated.

When Good Game Stores Go Good: Endgame

Well, the game store I blogged about in a previous post has closed its doors after 15 years of serving Atlanta. I wonder if it is the current state of the economy or the fact that when they moved locations they lost clientèle. I'm not sure. I'm sure I'll run into a gaming bud at some point that can offer some insight. My guess is the price of a gallon of gas and disposable income to spend on games are inversely proportional to each other.

I quit going after visiting the new location. It was harder to get to and didn't have the same appeal. Plus the gaming space was severely reduced. The noise coming from the ample back area that ranged from conversations about dwarfs, wizards, all things Warhammer and the occasional dialogs in Klingon was part of the appeal of the place.

I'm a bit disappointed in the fact that getting new games or hard to find models is now a little more difficult now that the store has gone. But alas, there is still eBay and BoardGameGeek.

What does that License Plate Say?

So I'm driving into work today. My office has moved so my drive is shorter and at times slower since I'm not on any of the major interstates. I see a car in the next lane with a license tag that reads SNSKDNY.

I'm usually pretty good at figuring things like that out. This one has me stumped though. the only thing I could come up with is Son's Kidney. So am I to assume that you sold your son's kidney to buy that car? I don't know what kidneys are going for these days but the driver could have gotten a nice certified pre-owned BMW or Audi or something like that.

Another good one I saw a few years a go was a hot blond driving a red corvette. The tag read WAS HIS. Ha!

Pest Exclusion

Sometimes the little things I see just crack me up. Here is a case in point.

I was driving into work with my wife today. She was driving so that gives me time to look around or daydream or whatever. I saw a truck next to me that had door magnets that read so and so's Pest Exclusion. I thought to myself hmm, is that some kind of kindler, gentler extermination? How would that exactly go down?

I could picture the exterminator, no, excluder walking onto the scene:

"Listen up critters. We've had some complaints for your sector and I'm here to set things straight. You there. Squirrels, Rabbits, Little Birds just step right over there. That's right everybody but the Opossum and Raccoon. We don't serve your kind here. You've been excluded. So you just get on out of here and don't make me come back. Yeah call animal rights. See if I care."

Just because an animal plays dead or wears a mask doesn't make them any less of an animal does it? But still, what a novel idea. Non-lethal extermination by exclusion. Brilliant.