My new project: Tact, a simple chat app.

Brutal schedules and technical problems in the form of Mac hard disk berserkness

August 29, 2007

It’s only Tuesday, but this week is truly shaping up as brutal on me. I’m doing pretty good up to now, but not sure how long I can keep up. I haven’t gone at this full steam for quite a while…

Classes started yesterday. They are brutally interesting, but also brutally intense and my work load is pretty high. This means that probably over the next few months, I’ll be quite light on blogging as I’m going to need every bit of writing and time bandwidth that I have to go to writing homeworks and papers and doing meetings and anything else to get my work done. Got a ton of books today… I have like 7 or 8 pretty intense textbooks that I’ll need to grind through this semester.

But of course, when it rains, it pours. First my kitchen light went out, just sent a notice to landlord. They’ve been good about doing timely repairs, hopefully they’ll get it fixed soon before it gets really dark.

And secondly, my Mac started acting up. It’s been a solid piece of equipment up to now, but last night it started freezing for no apparent reason. Multiple reboots didn’t help and when I ran Disk Utility, it showed disk corruption. UH OH. PANIC TIME.

Fortunately, I had taken my installation DVD’s along. Never leave home without them. They wouldn’t be good on another continent, but now I had them. Just popped it in and ran Disk Repair (you can’t do it while booting from hard disk, your disk needs to be “offline”).

After boot, things were mostly good, but some things were gone. This includes some unimportant document files, but also my iTunes playlist ;( well I had the files still there, but my ratings and play counts were gone. And that’s where the iPhone again comes in as a backup device. I had previously synced my “top rated” items to iPhone, meaning I could see the songs that I had rated, so that I could at least re-rate the same songs quickly again on iTunes, without going through the full humongous list.

Another thing that was broken was somehow my Keychain, meaning that most Internet passwords are probably gone. Which is again no biggie, as I keep multiple secure backups of passwords in the form of strongly encrypted disk images, both stored locally and kept online in secure places. So… make backups.