It seems there is no Firewire on the new 13" MacBooks. Not that I am considering buying one... my 2006 MacBook (the subject of the title of this blog), after all the back and forth and final replacement, has been acting as I was originally led to believe...

Now this is funny:
http://www.dailymotion.com/aarplane/video/12725654

I bought a fancy new alarm clock, the Sangean RCR22. It is an atomic clock, that is, it connects to the atomic clock in Boulder Colorado to display the most accurate time.

Now, I was just looking at my new clock, (timing the fantastic black bean stew I am cooking in my fancy new Fagor pressure cooker, yes, I went on a bit of a shopping binge), when I noticed my MacBook is a full 15 minutes behind the times, er time. This happened to me before, quite some time ago, and I was 15 minutes late meeting a friend because of it.

What happened was this, I reinstalled the OS in August, and neglected to open up the "Date & Time" preferences and select to "Set date & time automatically: Apple American/U.S. (time.apple.com)."

So, it took my MacBook, which is pretty much on all the time, and plugged into the wall (since the battery won't last more than 10 minutes on a full charge - yes, even after cycling) about seven months to fall behind fifteen minutes.

Neither here nor there... Just a reminder to set that automatic time... or be gradually late over 7 months... I suppose fifteen minutes is when the tardiness has ramifications.

I left my MacBook running, as usual, after my somewhat regular routine of blasting home for lunch to graze on veggies and beans while I navigate to www.ComedyCentral.com to catch up on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report with Stephen Colbert. When the Colbert Report finished, I closed the browser and headed back to the office. Getting home latter that eve, I was greeted by a gray screen of death...
After a few attempts at rebooting, refreshing pram, etc, I was soon greeted by the flashing directory with a question mark on it. Meaning this MacBook can't find an OS.
So, I booted up the OSX installer disk and went into disk utilities, and the hard drive was not recognized... then I could hear that little knocking noise coming from the hard drive that pretty much means this hard drive is deceased...
Now begins the process of calling on the extended warranty I purchased, aka Apple Care...

Well, it seems it was a good choice buying Apple Care last year after all... I took my MacBook into the Bellevue, Washington Apple Store, and a support technician (I can't bring myself to refer to them as 'geniuses'... I reserve the term 'genius' for folks like Charles Darwin, Carl Sagan, Thomas Jefferson, etc, you get the picture) popped in a new hard drive and restored a Leopard image on it. Now I'm back in operation... Next, I'll see if I can recover any data off the old disk by popping it in the freezer... it's worked for me before... stay tuned.

I was quite happy when Firefox 3 came out. I recall reading that Firefox changed how it handled memory and there was much rejoicing. I upgraded both my Windows ThinkPad at work and MacBook at home, and thought I noticed an immediate improvement, it was faster... it was better... it... or was I experiencing a placebo effect? Now that I've been using Firefox (currently on the latest 3.5.3), I can say, there was an improvement on my Windows machine, but on the Mac, Firefox still eats through my poor MacBook's measley 1 GB of memory like the Rapa Nui did their ecosystem. Crash. Crash. Crash. Sigh.

I think I will do as Duncan Riley has (see TechCrunch article: Firefox 3 Beta 1: The Memory Use Says It All and download Flock instead.

Well, the MacBook continues to hum along (without Firefox crashing so much now that I maxed out the ram on it to its full 2 Gigs), but I have finally lost patients with the Mac Mighty Mouse I purchased over a year ago. It never tracked as well as the old Logitech usb mouse I had. Scrolling was always lame, and got lamer with use... always loosing the ability to scroll up in a browser. I'd have to hold the mouse down and spin the little ball backwards like made to clean it up, then I'd get some scrolling again... but now that doesn't work any more, so, I just hurled it from my desk towards the garbage can, and plugged in an ancient old Microsoft usb mouse. It is far superior to the Apple Mighty Mouse. Far superior.