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.

Farewell to the Woblin' Goblin

The original stealth fighter is being retired. It's being replaced by the more stealthy and stable F-22. The F-117 has been around since the 1970's in one form or another. It's being moth balled so it could possibly see service again if needed.

Perhaps the incident in Europe during the Kosovo conflict lead to the decision for such an early retirement. Early considering the F-14 is pushing 40 years. Once the plane was shot down and different governments were able to get a good look at the wreckage, I would surmise the USAF decided to send it to an early retirement due to the fact that these other governments, so called, could develop technologies to detect its presence early enough to kick up the attrition rates of the fighter.

The trade off, I think, is a good one. The F-22 is much more stable in flight and the cool thing is it can go almost Mach 2 without going on afterburner. Sure it's expensive but there is nothing else out there (that we know of) that can touch it. The plane basically flies itself. A friend of mine works on the F-22 program and says the pilots will ask the civilian engineers "How can I get the plane to do such and such and so and so." The engineers basically say "Don't touch anything."


F-117 R.I.P. April 22, 2008

File under Ummmm yeah. okay.

Right. So all I need is those ultra hip goggles with the camera, a swank-ass white coat and I can find that Star Wars figure I lost when I was a kid? Only if you were wearing the goggles when you lost it.

Apparently the goggles are hooked into a computer that you wear on your back. It uses image recognition software and you tell the goggles (or more appropriately the software) what stuff is and remembers the last place you looked at it with the goggles on.

I assume you can eventually pick up some terrabyte sized storage accessories to add to it since you are going to be making your own reality show called "Where's that damn thing I had yesterday" recording everything you touch and see for days on end.

I wonder if it could find my virginity? No. You sold that car. Remember?

Here's your link...

Music Rig Update:

Desk cleared -- Check
Sound Card re-installed -- Check
Side Panel Back On -- Check
Just have to get my MIDI rig going.

I've hemmed and hawed over what software to use and I've finally settled on Sonar. I like the fact that you can use ACID loops natively and it has very robust MIDI support. The coolest thing is the active controller technology or ACT that is built into it. No switching patches on your control surface. Basically you make a Sonar component active, map your controls then save. Then you move on to the next component. So when you have a component active like the mixer, your controls control only the mixer. If you switch to a soft synth or effect the controller is "re mapped" by Sonar. Very cool for speeding up work flow.

I also have an independent record label in the works. More on that later.

Ink Jets Rock -- Really

So whats a techie to do with their old Ink Jet Printers? Turn them into a musical instrument of course. That's Lesley Flanigan and Andrew Doro. I think it's pretty cool. Now if we could figure out who is printing documents worthy of a Grammy nomination we could take that drug addicted Amy Winehouse out of the running.

Main Music Rig Being Re-Built

Well,

The creative process has come to a grinding halt while I re-build my main music making machine. I'm totally re doing everything. I've got a brand new SATA drive that getting a fresh install of Windows XP Professional. I'm not quite ready to take the plunge into Vista yet. The OS Really doesn't have anything to offer me quite yet.

I'm adding a couple of new hardware pieces to my rack as well. I picked up a MOTU Midi Express XT 8 in 8 out Midi interface. I decided I wanted to run the bulk of my gear with USB and Midi as Midi so when I decide to gig out it will be easy to get everything to communicate instead of having a daisy chain of USB hubs. I also picked up a Pocket POD for my guitar sound sculpting needs. I was using a Behringer V-Amp but the POD sounds sooo much better. At least I think it does. Both have their merit but there seems to be more support for the POD products.

Creativity will be resuming soon as I add back on the Music software and various VSTi's and what not. I'll keep you posted. In the meantime, some of my newer stuff can be heard on my myspace page if you are into that. http://www.myspace.com/idtmusic Add me as a friend.

Green n’ Sexxy!!

When I go green, I want to look damn good doing it. Think I'll pick up one of these puppies. Fisker’s Hybrid sports sedan. Screw you hippies in your Toyota Prius. I'm all about un-adulterated Green Materialism here. Sleek, Sexy, and Fuel Efficient. Gotta Love it.

Public Schools: “We make things gooder.”

Thank goodness she looks good. She should have at least said "world peace" or "end hunger."

Alternate Commuting Methods

What I wouldn't give for a pneumatic tube from house to my desk. I would just step in at the front door and *foomp!!!* off I go. And then on the other end *foomp!!!* "Hey everybody!"

It's all about time really. The other morning it took me 1 hour and 45 minutes. School is back in so the time it takes to get from my house to the interstate seems to increase exponentially.

I've tried leaving the house earlier but I'm, not that guy. I loathe the morning. Always have. Even when I was a kid mom would have to drag my sorry ass out of bed almost every morning. I never ate breakfast. That was 10 or 15 minutes of sleep I would "lose" in the morning. Get up (eventually), shower, catch the bus just in time and go to school.

Yesterday I left later. Well, I trimmed 15 minutes off. An hour and a half. Today I left even later. I left at 9:20 and got here at 10:05. Better but traffic was still pretty thick in places. That just means I have to stay till 6:30 or so. The drive in the evening is usually shorter but I won't get home till around 7:30 probably. Then eat, watch a bit of TV, pay bills then bed. So where is "my time"?

That's why I want the pneumatic tube. My commute will be a matter of seconds as opposed to hours. Plus I think it would be loads of fun. I could even go home for lunch. I would even have the luxury of using my own bathroom. No public toilets for me.

I'm not sure about the physics behind it but I don't really care. That's an SEP. Just make one and I'll install it.

Since it's just air I doubt I would even have to dry my hair after my shower. That would save an additional 5 minutes.

The Death of Reading?

I remember back in the day when the first Harry Potter book came out. I was amazed to see so many kids reading. They weren't playing video games nor were they watching TV they were reading. I was amazed. I haven't read any of the books myself and probably never will. I'm not a big fantasy genre fan. I prefer history, techno-thrillers and just about anything involving submarines. Any way I digress...

I've heard rumors that the beloved Harry could possibly meet his untimely demise in the last installment though it would seem unlikely to me given the fact that there are still a few movies left to be made. I just wonder that if Harry does end up ten feet under what will that do to the millions of kids and adults who only read Harry Potter books?

I could imagine all of J.K.'s myrmidons turning on her and storming her estate with pitchforks and torches. Imagine a bunch of LARPers, pre-teens and adults in business suits marching across the moors to exact the same brand of justice that Harry received at the hands of some nefarious evil. More than likely if Harry dies, he may well slip in the shower on his Hogwarts soap on a rope. It's soap on a ROPE Harry. You wear it around your neck so you don't drop it. It does make washing your feet kinda difficult though.

More than likely they'll bitch and moan on forums an blogs then just stop reading all together.

I see the death of Harry as the death of literacy. We've had good run. Farewell.

I Have a New Addiction

It's been awhile since I got totally cracked out on a video game.

My new time killer dujour is called Sensible Soccer 2006. It's easy-peasy to play. There are essentially only two buttons you use: Pass and Shoot. The cool thing is after you hold down the shoot button for power you can apply all kinds of English to the ball and score some pretty killer goals. Nothing like pegging the upper left hand corner from 35 yards out. The sprint button is useful for knocking opposing players off the ball as well. You can play an entire game in about 15 minutes too.

There are tons of options for playing leagues an tournaments. Right now I'm in the middle of a 40 game season playing as Newcastle. I lost my first two games then tied two and heave been undefeated since.

There are patches you can download to make the play a little more realistic. I'll probably get those when I finish my first season. You have to win tourneys and leagues to unlock different balls, pitches and playing conditions. The game is a total hoot.

Even if you are not a big soccer fan, this is fun to play. I haven't played any of the EA FIFA games but I hear Sensible Soccer is much easier to play. Even thought the play is kind of arcade like the players seem to behave with real "soccer intelligence."

I am having much fun with this one.

Hog got Balls!

Take a look at the motorcycle on the left. I know the pic is kinds grainy but my cell phone camera kinda sucks. Either that or I don't have the settings adjusted properly. Anyway, the bike on the left has a pair of gonads hanging down off the back. Not sure if they belong to the driver or the rider. The driver was a guy but the rider was a rather burly looking lass. So who knows.

What is this supposed to mean. I got balls? My bike has balls? I like balls? Kinda disturbing the things people try to say with their "things" on their stuff.

The Pre-Re-Mix CD Avaialble Soon

In the near future I'll be releasing a "hand made" edition of the Pre-Re-Mix CD. I say handmade because I will be printing and assembling all materials myself. Plus I will be hand numbering and signing each one as well. It's already mastered and I am currently working on the artwork for the cover as time allows.

It will contain all my old tracks that were on the old mp3.com site as well as my school projects from my college days. It will be a very limited release of 50-100 CDs. I haven't decided yet. So once it's gone... It's gone. I'm not planning on pursuing any online distribution for this release at this time. I will probably make some of the tracks available for download on my site. The idea is to get something out there and start working on more new material.

I'll keep everyone posted through the usual channels. Keep Listening!

Barry Bonds at 754

I don't care for Barry Bonds. He's a jerk form I've seen and read about him. I know he's close to closing in on Hank Aaron's home run record.

When I was a kid, my parents let me stay up "extra" so I could watch hand break the record. Even though it's a vague memory at this point, I still have what I think I saw in my head. I don't want that memory erased by some performance enhancing drug using butt head ruining that for me.

Will I watch the historic occasion? I have this to say: "Hell no." Hank Aaron said he wouldn't be there wherever there might be. I hate to see a record tarnished with an asterisk. But that is what is going to happen. It will say: "Barry Bonds 7xx Home Runs*". So sad for the game of baseball.

Here's my solution: All the pitchers in the league band together after Bonds reaches 754 and walk him every time he is at bat. No matter what the score or the situation is. Better yet hit him with a pitch. Maybe it will force him into an early retirement. Give him 754 bruises to go with his home runs. Sounds mean, I know. But he's a real a-hole so why not.