This isn't the droid I was looking for

... but it's the one I ended up with. See, I finally decided it was (past) time to upgrade my cell phone, a Motorola RAZR that I got back in 2007, when I defected to Verizon after AT&T summarily shut down the TDMA network they acquired along with Cingular, which my old phone had used. I liked the RAZR a lot, but the battery no longer held a charge for long, and the phone was undeniably, well, dumb. I couldn't get email on it, it most certainly didn't surf the web, and even sending a text (I think I might have done so as many as three times) was painful, limited as it was to the standard numeric keypad (press 1 once for a, twice for b, three times for c).

Back when the iPhone came out, and one of my co-workers got one, I thought it was pretty nice, but because it was AT&T-exclusive, I wouldn't even consider getting one. I did end up getting an iPod Touch, thereby acquiring much of the functionality of the iPhone without the phone. Still I craved the camera and GPS. But not from AT&T.

Finally, Apple took Verizon into the fold and, lo, an iPhone could now be mine. But by then, another of my co-workers had acquired a Droid X, which was pretty nice too, and I began to think maybe the iPhone wasn't my holy grail after all. Among other things, I had to consider that getting an iPhone would make my iPod Touch redundant (and I already have a fairly redundant iPod nano). Still, even the Droid X lacked something, a feature that I had come to wish my iPod Touch had: a physical keyboard. Granted, the virtual keyboard is pretty amazing, but even my relatively small digits proved clumsy at typing on virtual keys with no tactile borders.

I began exploring the options, and it came down to the Droid 2, which has the same size display as an iPhone, Froyo operating system (Android 2.2) – and most important, a slide-out keyboard. I dithered for a while longer, and finally made the plunge, upgrading to a Droid 2 (with, of course, a concomitant hike in my monthly bill for that required data plan).

So now I have the best of both worlds: On the one hand, a powerful smartphone that's really the pocket computer I've always wanted, complete with a very nice keyboard that my clumsy thumbs can manipulate with too many typos to correct, and access to the entire Android Marketplace. And on the other hand, my iPod Touch gives me access to the majority of the iTunes App Store.

But what, you may ask, about that rather prominent Star Wars logo on the screen? Well, that's what I meant about it not being the droid I was looking for.

As it happens, the Droid 2 comes in two flavors. The first is the Droid 2 Global, which is a pretty standard-issue phone, with the back available in white or – my personal favorite – a dark sapphire. The second is the Droid 2 R2-D2, with a back that looks like, well, exactly what you'd expect. It also comes with exclusive R2-D2 ringtones and miscellaneous Star Wars-themed content.

At first, I wasn't even considering little Artoo. I mean, I liked Star Wars much as the next person, but I'm hardly the kind of SW geek that just has to have the Star Wars model of whatever gadget I'm in the market for. And in truth, I thought it would look a bit silly for someone my age to be sporting such a gadget. (Now, if it had been, say, a Star Trek tricorder look-alike, that would have been a totally different story. But I digress.) Besides, the sapphire-blue Droid 2 Global was really sharp-looking.

And then I compared the prices.

The Droid 2 Global with a new two-year contract, with my $50 upgrade allowance, would cost me $149. R2-D2, on the other hand, although it normally listed for more than the Global, was on sale and, after my upgrade allowance, came to a mere $49. Was the understated sapphire back cover I wanted worth $100? Moreover, wouldn't I just be putting a sleeve or skin on the phone anyway, covering up the back and making it moot? The answers to those questions were no and yes, respectively, and so R2-D2 went into my Verizon shopping cart, and now graces the cell phone pocket of my shoulder bag.

The only time Artoo asserts his presence is in the rare instances when I shut my phone off; when turned on, a brief clip of Artoo beeping and booping away is displayed, and then he disappears. I immediately ditched the Star Wars logo by replacing the wallpaper. (And I haven't even gotten around to putting a sleeve on the phone yet.) No, not quite the droid I was looking for... but a fair trade-off for a $100 savings

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Can you hear me now?

So, I've had this Toshiba laptop for, oh, about three or four years now. (No, I haven't abandoned my Mac; it's just that most of the courses I've been taking at the community college are Windows-centric, so I got a Windows laptop back when my Mac wouldn't run Windows.) Anyway, when I first got it, I remember the sound working OK. You know, the little riffs that Windows plays when it starts up or shuts down. I had little occasion to play any other sounds, since I do all my email and web surfing on the Mac.

Then, somewhere along the line, the sound just... disappeared. Well, not entirely; but when I tried to listen to a web video for one of my classes, the volume was very, very low. All attempts to adjust the volume in the sound control panel did exactly nothing. I finally gave up, on the grounds that a) I could get along without the video anyway, and b) I could also get along without Windows' startup and shutdown music, which I realized had also faded to near-silence without my really noticing.

OK, then last fall I started my new job, and since February, most of the time I've been able to telecommute a couple days a week. Now, being a contractor to a government agency, I'm restricted to working on my government-issue office workstation, via Remote Desktop over a VPN with so many layers of security I practically have to provide a DNA sample to log in , and the client software is strictly Windows-based. No problem, I just use my otherwise underutilized and nearly mute Toshiba laptop, which is fine because that leaves my Mac free for accessing my personal email, which cannot be done on the same computer where I'm logged in to the VPN. (I told you they're security-conscious.)

The only thing that's been a bit annoying is that, because of the extremely low volume, I don't hear the Outlook "new mail" alert sound for my work email, and with three or four other apps open and obscuring the Outlook window, I have to periodically check to see if I've gotten anything important, like an email from the boss checking to see if I'm really working or skipped out for a two-hour lunch. So last Friday, I finally got fed up with the silent treatment and decided to do some troubleshooting.

I dug around in the Windows help files; tried the troubleshooting wizard; and attempted to update the driver for the RealTek "sound device" (as Windows so quaintly refers to it), only to be informed that I already had the latest driver available. Time to Google "no sound Realtek Toshiba laptop"... whereupon I stumbled into a plethora of forum posts from people who lost the sound on their laptops, with the same RealTek device as mine, after doing various upgrades (in the majority of cases, to Vista). Now, I haven't upgraded to Vista (and won't be), but it did look like I was on to something. I found advice to uninstall the driver and reinstall it; to get a new driver from Toshiba (but that was a Vista driver so that wouldn't help me); to apply a couple of Windows hot fixes from the Knowledge Base before (re)installing the driver (but when I read the KB articles, they didn't seem to apply to my problem); and lots more. And yet... and yet... it was nagging at me that all these folks talked about losing the sound completely, whereas mine still made some sound, albeit far too few decibels.

And then, I chanced upon one forum post that mentioned in passing that, of course, you should make sure your volume control scroll wheel wasn't turned down, if your laptop had one.

Volume... control... scroll wheel? Huh? Seriously? Surely modern-day laptops don't have something as archaic as a physical volume control that you, like, turn? OK, fine, I'll take a look just to be sure.

And there it is, right on the front, next to the mike and headphone jacks. Who knew? Thanks to the clever black-on-black design, I never noticed it. And sure enough, it was turned almost all the way down. After resetting the volume to the midpoint in the control panel, I started turning the volume wheel up, and behold: the sound now works once more. Nothing wrong with the sound chip, or the drivers, or anything really, except the operator, who is rather embarrassed to have owned a laptop for three or four years without ever realizing it had a real, honest-to-goodness volume control on the box.

So now I'll finally be able to tell when I get an email and reply promptly so my boss won't think I'm taking a nap.

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Greer's Law

Greer's Law

A computer program does what you tell it to do, not what you want it to do.

... an axiom amply demonstrated by the web applications inherited by the project team for which I write documentation.

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Crash landing

So, a few weeks ago I'm browsing for Tupperware auctions on eBay, here on my not-quite-two-year-old MacBook, when suddenly I get this spinning beach ball. Not too unusual, when you're paging through even a small part of the 250+ pages such a search returns.

Only trouble is, the beach ball won't go away. And then... the hard drive starts to click.

I won't bore you with all the gory details of my quest to recover something – anything! – from that clicking drive. Suffice it to say that it never booted again; that neither Apple's Disk Utility nor two different well-regarded Mac recovery apps could even see the drive, let alone find anything on it; that my last backup proved to be about two years old (i.e., the copy I made to transfer everything from my old TiBook to my new MacBook); and that quotes from reputable hard drive recovery services started at $700-$1000 (depending on whether clean-room work was needed). My files are valuable to me, but they're not quite that valuable.

After a long-shot attempt to use a DOS-based recovery app that has had success with Mac drives hooked up to a PC motherboard – but not, alas, with my Mac drive – I wrote off the drive as a total loss and gave it to friends who get their jollies experimenting with dead drives. They tried replacing the control board with one from an identical drive they got on eBay, but it still wouldn't run, and when they opened the drive and took a look at the platters, one had a neat, and very deep, groove in it, pretty much like the one in the photo above (which I found on Google images, since I didn't think to photograph mine).

Meanwhile, I installed a new hard drive twice the size of the original, and while I was inside the case I doubled the RAM. I then spent days reinstalling the system, installing all the outstanding system updates, and digging up and reinstalling all my apps, including several I had bought as download and had no restore media for. (Yes, yes, I know you're supposed to back the installers up to a CD or external drive! Just like I know you're supposed to back your @#$%&* document files up at intervals slightly shorter than two years.)

Then I restored my files from that two-year-old backup, and took stock of what I had lost:

• Two years worth of email (I keep everything) and about half of my address book.
• Two years worth of Firefox bookmarks, login IDs, and passwords.
• Bank and bill statements from all those online accounts that don't send hard copies any more.
• All the records of my 9-month job search in 2008, including resumes, letters, contact information, job-search-related bookmarks, and lots more. (And lest you think that's trivial, I should point out that I made good use of my 2005 job search records as a starting point for the 2008 effort.)
• Extensive financial/retirement calculation spreadsheets that are going to be a bear to reconstruct.
• All the records of several hundred dollars worth of eBay sales from the last year, plus my auction templates (I had put a lot of effort into refining my boilerplate copy and HTML formatting in the last few months) and quite a few photos I had stockpiled of items that I hadn't got around to putting up for sale yet.
• My iTunes library, though that is in fact fairly trivial, as it was all ripped CDs that I still own, not purchased tunes. Still, a bloody nuisance to redo.
  

And there's more, of course, probably some of which won't hit me until I find myself looking for something that's just not there, and realize it belongs to the Lost Era.

The one thing that, thankfully, I didn't lose is my photos. All my digital photos (except the eBay shots) are either on the two-year-old backup, or still on the original CF or SD cards. I knew there was a reason not to wipe those cards...

Anyway, in the time-honored tradition of locking the barn door after the horse has been stolen, I now have a free Mozy account that grabs my files and sends an encrypted incremental update up into the cloud once a day, whether I think about it or not. I'll also be burning CDs periodically and backing up to an external drive (yes, I do have one; in fact, I have three altogether, so why don't I use them?). And then, hopefully, I'll never have a repeat of this dismal debacle.

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OutFoxed

If you run Firefox as your main browser, you probably know that Firefox 3 went live earlier this week. If you haven't upgraded yet, take my considered advice: Don't!

I looked over the new features on the Firefox website this morning, and it looked good, so I downloaded and installed it. Les than two hours later, I was downgrading back to 2.0.0.14 (which, fortunately, I was able to locate on their support site, since the FF3 install overwrites FF2). Why?

1. In that under-two-hour span, FF3 crashed at least eight times (I didn't think to keep track until it was too late). It crashed while I was on the Firefox site, looking for add-ons and searching the support pages; it crashed on a blog that I access daily; it crashed after I installed a new theme; it crashed when I tried to uninstall the theme; it crashed on startup. (I had to start in Safe Mode to get rid of that theme.)
2. Three quarters of my extensions (and I have a lot of them) were not compatible with FF3. Of those, only three had new, compatible versions.
3. My favorite theme is not compatible with FF3, and the IMO the default theme sucks. It's dark (grey and black), and very hard to read the favorites toolbar, which displayed no favicons, just text.
   
4. A new version of my theme is available. Unfortunately it seemed to be even more crash-prone than the default (see #1). Oh, and there was no vertical scrollbar. Pretty inconvenient to navigate without that.
   
5. When I checked out the missing scrollbar issue in the Mozilla Knowledge Base, I found that this is a known issue for "certain themes" in Mac OS X. The solution? Go back to the default theme. According to one post on the Firefox support forum, a Mac user tried a number of themes and none of them displayed a scrollbar.
6. The support forum was absolutely crammed with posts clamoring for the location of the 2.0.0.14 download so they could go back to a browser that works. They were running XP, Vista, Mac OS X, and Linux. Across the board, the opinion was that FF3 sucks.
   

I should know better than to install an upgrade so soon; it's very uncharacteristic of me. (Heck, I stuck with OS 9.2 until shortly before 10.4 came out.) But I've had such good luck in the past with Firefox, I just never anticipated this piece of crap.

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Continuing education (cont.)

The PL/SQL course I took in the fall finished up in December, and I did indeed opt to take another course from the same instructor this term. It's not the one I was originally thinking about (which I think was database administration) -- this is another hybrid course that meets only every other week, Server-Side Programming using PHP and MySQL. Of course, if I were clairvoyant I could have registerd for two or three courses this term, as it appears I will have loads of unanticipated free time (i.e., time that I don't get paid for, which is currently all of it). On the other hand, tuition costs money, which is not something I'll have loads of.

One of the nice things about this course is that the textbook for it isn't really a textbook; it's one of the Peachpit Press "Visual QuickPro Guide" series of computer books. That means that it does not cost $75-$100 like a real textbook does. It's a much more manageable $40 list, and Amazon, bless its little heart, had it for 40% off. Astute (and mathematically inclined) readers will have figured out that that's only $24, a real bargain for a "textbook" these days. And the software is all open source and free.

And if that's not enough, I should note that the software even runs on my beloved Mac. No wrestling with Windows this time around. What's not to love? (Well, the videos the instructor posts as supplemental material to the in-class lectures run only in Windows, but I tend to ignore them anyway, as they rarely cover anything I can't get out of the book.)

Maybe, with any luck, all these classes I've been taking will be a plus on my resume. I'm going to need all the pluses I can get.

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iPanic

So I'm minding my own business, just trying to start up "Classic" (I've still got some archaic software, having only been dragged kicking and screaming into the age of OS X five months ago -- a week before I was laid off, but that's another issue), when my computer freezes up and a strange white on black notice appears telling me, in a low-key sort of conversational tone (in four languages, no less), that I need to restart my computer. WTF?

Seems that OS X, that oh-so-stable OS that "never crashes" -- well, that's true, I guess. It doesn't crash, it just panics. Yes, I had experienced my very first kernel panic. Funny how much it seemed like a good old-fashioned crash, wherein your computer freezes up and displays a notice that "A System Error has occurred" with a cute little bomb and a Restart button that seldom works. But of course it really can't be the same at all, because OS X never crashes.

Just what I need, a computer that needs Prozac.

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Dead CD-ROM drive comes back to life

Just before January 24th, I had gotten my laptop updated to OS X (10.3) from OS 9.2 (I was probably the last holdout on system 9). Just after January 24th, the CD-ROM drive stopped working. It was always a little flaky and sluggish about pulling in a disk, but now, while you could insert the disk, it wouldn't mount. Even Disk Utility couldn't find it. The only way to eject it was with the manual eject button.

Not having a couple hundred bucks to spare right now for a replacement drive, I've been putting off doing anything about it. Then yesterday, just for the heck of it, I fed it the hardware diagnostic disk that came with the laptop. Lo and behold, the disk mounts, I reboot with it as the startup disk and run the diagnostics -- which unfortunately seem to test everything but the damned CD drive, but at least I know everything else is OK. So I'm hoping the drive has really come back to life permanently (or at least for the near future), because I do have some software to install. The only down side is that the original drive is just a CD/DVD drive, not a CD burner, and I had figured that at least replacing the drive would give me CD-R/RW capability. Still, $200 is $200.

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