Another Word for Nerd

I’ve had an iPhone since they came out last year, and ever since I got the phone, I’ve been on the search for the perfect iPhone case.

I started out with an iPhone Total Body Skin from BestSkinsEver (ShieldZone sells an identical product, at a higher price). This protects the screen, and adds some not-really-needed protection to the back and sides of the phone that gives me some peace of mind.

First, I started out with a generic snug form-fitting rubber/plastic case bought off eBay. It was okay (better than nothing at all), but didn’t quite fit right and started to “sag” and get loose after only a month or so.

My second iPhone case was the Incase Leather Fitted Sleeve for iPhone. I bought this one from the Apple online store, using part of the store credit that Apple gave out after the iPhone price reduction. It was in use less than a week; the case didn’t fit properly (too tight) and the stitching started to put little divots/indentations into the screen and body protective film. The port access holes never lined up right, and the leather bits on the sides of the phone would “roll” one way or the other. I eventually just took it off and threw it in a drawer somewhere.

My third iPhone case was the DLO Jam Jacket. This was a big improvement over the generic rubber sleeve case and the leather fitted case. However, I don’t use the iPhone earbuds and don’t need to carry them around, so I used a razor blade to cut the “earbud holder” off the back of the case. I used that case for six months or so; my only real complaints are that the texture and “tackyness” of the rubber used tends to attract dust and dirt and that the holes on the side for volume and mute access aren’t very user-friendly (I often had to just pull the top part of the case off the phone when I needed to get to the mute switch).

I was at MicroCenter tonight, and ran across what is, for me, the best case for the iPhone - the XtremeMac Tuffwrap. It’s got the same basic shape and “grip” as the DLO case but without the headphone stuff on the back, and has nicely-formed ports for access to the lock button, side buttons, and bottom dock connector. It came with a TuffShield screen protector, but I’m not using that because the phone already has a protective skin permanently installed.

Other than the generic rubber case I first got off of eBay, the XtremeMac Tuffwrap is also the cheapest case I’ve purchased for my phone, at $19.95. I don’t think I’ll need to find an alternative!

I now have a matched pair of 500G Hitachi SATA disks (in stripped Sun Unipack enclosures) as my external disk and Time Machine backup disk, to avoid a repeat of a couple weeks ago.

As for radio stuff, a week after I bought the FRG-100 from a friend, another friend said “Hey, I have a Kenwood TS-430S here that you can have for cost of shipping.” DOH! Anyway, $80 in shipping fees later, I now have this setup for when I pass my General upgrade exam:

Left to right: AT-250 automatic antenna tuner, TS-430S transceiver, PS-430 power supply.

I’ll eventually have to send it off for minor repair of a known problem and a tuneup, but that will only cost me $200. For a grand total of around $300, this is a VERY NICE rig that still runs around $600 with the extra components on eBay.

Now I have to figure out how I’m going to get a decent antenna up in the limited space I have available.

Got out of bed this morning (I’ve been sick for the past three days), walked into the office, and my external 250G hard drive (a Western Digital combo USB2/Firewire unit) is making “CLACK. CLACK. CLACK” noises. It’s dead.

I lost a bit of stuff obtained via BitTorrent, along with lots of PDF archive documents, some work I’d done scanning a 300-page book to release as a PDF (with the author’s permission), and worst of all, the 40G of scanned comic books I’d collected over the past three years. I have nobody to blame but myself - I had another external 250G disk here that I’d been intending to hang off the Airport Extreme and use for backup for months now, but I never got off my ass and set it up.

After I finished being angry about the dead drive (which was TWO MONTHS out of its one-year warranty), I hooked up the other disk and set up Time Machine to do backups of my internal drive for now.

Thanks to a consulting client of mine, I’ve got two 500G Hitachi SATA disks on the way that should be here early next week. I’ll be putting each of them in a gutted Sun 411 disk enclosure, replacing the internal SCSI bits with a Sabrent USB2 to SATA adapter.

Once those disks are ready, I’ll be dedicating one of them as a Time Machine backup disk, with the other in two partitions; one for “critical” data (will be backed up) and the other for non-critical data (not backed up). The single 500G external for Time Machine should be plenty to keep a “rescue” copy of all the data on my internal (250G) drive and the 250G “critical” external.

This will leave my current USB2-based external 250G disk that I’m using for Time Machine until the 500Gs get here; I’ll either keep it detatched and hook it up once a month for “last ditch” backups, or hang it off the old Dell SC420 in the other room that does nothing but rsnapshot backups of my colocated server in Austin.

I’ve updated the Essential Mac Software page with changes for Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard”.

One example is the Logitech Trackman Marble FX. Logitech discontinued them after 2-3 years of production, and has yet to introduce a replacement that feels or works as well in my opinion.

My wife and I buy them whenever we find them available, but a shrinking
supply has driven the prices up into the stratosphere - we paid $75
for one from a friend a year ago, and used prices on Amazon are almost
$300 the last time I checked. I can occasionally find one for less than $10 in the bin at Goodwill Computerworks, but they’re few and far between.

I would love to see Logitech introduce a modern version of the Trackman
Marble FX, or even run across 2-3 of them in good shape for a decent
price.

I bought a slide rule on eBay today.

Sometimes I think I was born 10-15 years too late; I have a strange affinity with 1960s and 1970s technology.

Early Sunday afternoon, there was apparently a power and/or UPS failure in the datacenter at my office. By 5pm, most of the systems were back up except for one that I’m responsible for.

Fire up the VPN, hit the ILO remote console (one of the few things that makes using x86 systems as servers bearable) and see “Cannot find boot.bin” Uh-oh. I head to the office at 6pm.

It seems that a certain Sun patch turns non-GRUB systems into non-bootable systems after application. There’s a specific set of steps to follow when this patch is installed and a system is “upgraded” to the GRUB bootloader, but apparently Sun’s “smpatch” utility does not follow these steps. The patch had been applied months ago, but the system didn’t get rebooted until the power outage.

I figured “Okay, the system was running Solaris 10 FCS, so its time to do an upgrade install of S10u4 anyway”. After some other problems and workarounds, four hours later, I watch in resignation as the install hangs and locks up (not accepting keyboard input at a Y/N prompt) while trying to install the CPQary package. This package is the drivers that Solaris x86 needs in order to use the hardware RAID built into the Compaq DL360.

I bite the bullet and do a “nuke from orbit” fresh install of S10u4, planning to restore from backups. I ended up having to rebuild most of the services on the box by hand (which was better in the long run, as things needed cleaning up) as our backup system had also been affected by the power outage and it wasn’t available until Monday morning.

To make a long story short, I went to the office at 6pm Sunday, and finally walked out of my office to go home and get some sleep at 10:30am Monday. 16 hours is the longest single shift I’ve ever pulled anywhere, and certainly the longest after-hours session.

I’ve got one more service to restore onto the box on Tuesday, but it’s non-critical and could wait until I got some rest.

I can’t complain - I might have incidents like these once or twice a year, and it’s a lot better than getting called or paged every other day like I was used to at my last job. I really like my job and my managers and coworkers.

I’ve given up on the Apple Mighty Mouse, having gone through two of them since 2005. I finally got fed up with having to completely dissasemble it to properly clean the ball rollers every couple of months, and then either glue or tape the “retaining ring” back onto the bottom of the mouse.

In my opinion, Apple really should have made the scroll ball optical instead of mechanical rollers and Hall-effect sensors, and they should have designed it to be easily cleanable. Apple’s suggestion to “Roll the ball vigorously while cleaning with water” while holding the mouse upside down” is NOT an acceptable solution. More than once, I had to completely take apart the Mighty Mouse, unscrew the “ball module” from the top shell, and then take THAT module apart to be able to clean the gunk from the tiny rollers with magnetic ends.

I tried every solution in the book to avoid dissasembly, but none of them worked for long. Saliva, Windex, tiny adhesive tape strips wrapped around the ball, etc. I had moderate success with Hoppe’s #9 gun-cleaning solvent, but even that only worked for a week or two before the rollers started gunking up again.

If the Mighty Mouse wasn’t $49, it might be a different story - I’d just go buy a new one every six months. For now, I’ve replaced it with a $25 Logitech LX3 optical mouse. The only problems I’ve ever had with Logitech mice were their microswitches wearing out after four or five years of heavy use.

As a final note, I’ll say that the Mighty Mouse is only the second piece of Apple hardware that I’ve “given up” on - the first was the original FireWire iSight camera. I bought one in 2004, and returned it for a refund the next day - for $150, I expected much better audio and video quality than I got from the camera.

I’m out of the office in VMware training this week.

Update: I took pictures of the training facility, mostly to show off the weird artwork in the hallways and the “no smoking” sign right next to an ashtray.

I’ve not had time to work on it in almost three months, so a friend is on his way here right now to take the Amiga hardware (two A2000s and an A4000) off my hands. He’s buying the A4K, but I’m giving the rest of it to him for free.

I’ll continue to work and play with the Amiga via emulation, but I’ve had to realize that I just don’t have the room and the time to work with actual hardware nowdays.