My Kingdom for More Disk Space

So I installed iLife ‘06 on my iBook and cringed when I saw that it left me with something like 250MB of space available on hard drive. Ack. So I started hunting down apps and files that I don’t use to throw away or archive on to my desktop with it’s 80-, 160-, 200- & 250-GB hard drives. I tossed iDVD (in that the iBook doesn’t have a DVD writer) and a bunch of other apps and files hidden in various libraries. I know that there are utilities that can scour all the unneeded tutorial, video and language files off of ones hard drive. My hand cleaning efforts have gotten me up to 2.84BG of spare space. That got me to looking for how much space was being used by the different directories, etc. But when I added up the 25GB users folder, 12GB applications folder, and 11GB system/library folders it didn’t quite add up to how much space I thought that I had on my iBook. All this to say that I discovered this morning that my new iPod video has the same disk space as my iBook, 60GB and not the 80GB I thought my iBook had. Shit.

So that got me thinking that maybe, instead of upgrading my aging (4-year-old) 933-MHz PowerMac desktop, maybe I should move up to a new MacBookPro. Well, we’ll see. I’ll wait until summer/early fall before putting this plan in action. I do pretty much all my work on the iBook except video editing because I always need more disk space than my poor iBook could muster (and while using shared network drives is good for archiving, it’s not recommended for bandwidth intensive live editing). So the question is whether to move the current collection of 160/200/250GB hard drives to firewire enclosures or just keep ‘em in the PowerMac as networked drives (I believe that direct firewire or USB 2.0 connections are much faster than cat5 ethernet….). Ugh. money, money, money, gotta love it. Damn. Now I’m going to be drooling for the next six months. JBB

To Podcast or Not

So my friend, Greg, put together a wiki for some high school history class and that got me thinking about my blog and podcasting….

Hmmm…. checked out your wiki… what sort of “control” have you set up for contributors as far as them being actual students in the class… just curious. I didn’t click on the “join” link, i guess if I had I could probably answer my own question, but then that would defeat the purpose of dialogue. Right? Anyway, I did click on the topic links on the left and I surmise that you created a “page” for each heading in the course for them to contribute their understanding of the topic. I’d be curious about how the students actually would use it. We created a wiki (or two) over the past two terms at Pepperdine, but quite frankly I was so up to my eyeballs just trying to keep up (which I failed in miserably… ) that I never really contributed to the effort. For whatever reason, I’ve greatly enjoyed the solo blogging thing much more, especially after I got a better handle on how to add graphic elements.
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Just One More (Tech) Thing

Apple’s done it again…. Just when it seemed like Apple was all about the iPod, Steve Jobs presented the new Intel-based Macintosh computers during Tuesday morning’s keynote presentation at the MacWorld Expo being held in San Francisco. After all the buzz, it looked like as far as the user is concerned that there was no real difference between the previous G5-based iMacs and the new Intel-based iMacs: same industrial design, same all-in-one computer-hiding-in-the-LCD monitor, same built-in iSight camera… But then they compared the relative performance differences between the two models and the Intel-based models were two to three times faster. Looking at the specs I noted that they were comparing 2.1 GHz G5s with 2.0 Intel models with the Intel chips coming out on top. My newest Mac, a one-year-old 12-inch iBook, runs with a 1.07 GHz G4 while my “older” almost four-year-old PowerMac desktop computer runs with a 933 MHz G4 chip. I can’t even imagine how much faster these new systems must be compared to my relatively old G4s. Damn. Maybe I shouldn’t have purchased two 19″ LCD monitors last month… crap. JBB

Happy New Year Confusion

Ok, I’m confused. In that it’s taken me over a week to write this entry shows you how confused I am about all of this. So… it’s been a very long road but I was actually getting pretty comfortable with the whole thing about being best-friends with my former-love and having no other expectations beyond that. I mean, when we rounded the corner from September to November it was pretty clear to me that the pressures of her ongoing divorce and the upcoming holidays were such that she was operating on “survival mode,” staying busy with work and trying to manage the difficult transition her youngest son was having with the impending departure of dad and mom living together. Translation: whereas some might deal with said difficulty by losing themselves in a relationship (read: rebound) she was very much staying away from that scenario and basically being my “buddy on the phone” averaging about three or four calls a week. During Thanksgiving things got to the point where I needed some kind of confirmation of our relationship status, following which there were larger drops in communication. And, of course, I didn’t see her for either Thanksgiving or Christmas. Thus, while there were hints that she had been looking for a gift for me for Christmas, for the second year in a row I got nothing from her. All of which, continued to push me toward the conclusion that we’re just friends, and that she’s still in “emotionally unavailable” mode.

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Being in Love & Watching Movies

This winter vacation has been about catching up on movies. It was a hell of a long haul this past few months and one of the things that got dropped off along the way was watching movies (well, that and spending a day watching pro football every weekend, but that’s another story…). So, as soon as I got past the Christmas crunch I set my sights on catching up on all the movies I’d been missing. Traditionally that would have been Christmas day but that didn’t quite happen because I got all wrapped up in “renovating” my apartment. So it took me a few days before I got things in order at home enough to justify a night out at Taco Beach followed by a viewing of “The Chronicles of Narnia.”
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Ass Kicked in 2005, Praying for a Better 2006

“Men plan,
children change the plans,
and God laughs”

I think December kicked me in the ass… no, I know December kicked me in the ass. Basically, by the second weekend into the month I’d already taken four sick days, spent four days with a fever shivering under my blankets, gotten a none-too-subtle warning from my principal that if I don’t turn around the behavior problems in my one pre-algebra class I was going to get an unsatisfactory appraisal on my record and I was about miss assignment deadlines in three of the four classes I was taking at Pepperdine for my doctorate. Of course under all of this was a smoldering frustration with the prospect of facing another Christmas alone, having broken off things with my former love just before Thanksgiving. Something had to give. Alas, it looked like the only way I was going to straighten all of this out was to get off the Pepperdine “fast track” and take care of the work situation. Ugh. I know that others have had worse things happen this past year, but I am so glad to be done with this damn year. About the only bright spot in this whole f-ing year was the birth of my grand-daughter and getting the precious opportunities just before Thanksgiving and after Christmas to hold her. She’s a bright star in an otherwise very dark expanse of time. Good riddens 2005, Praying for a better 2006.

JBB January 2006