Category: Technology

No Politics! 

My computer is back and It looks like the Apple people did a very nice job with the repair. No scratches, dirt, debris, and everything is working the way it’s supposed to be.

I need to get back to writing and searching for a job. 

But in the meantime I’m enjoying completely trouble free operation and I got a new display out of the deal to boot.

Now… what was I doing?

Backups… Check

Government bashing … Check

Windows update … Check

Jerking off …  ???

Where’s that Lube?

I’ve been busy.

Turns out my computer was dying a slow graceful death. I’ve seen this before with Apple Machines. I don’t know if it’s by design, or I’m just damn lucky, but I’ve had machines that developed serious problems continue to operate when by rights they should have folded.

My computer had been glitchy and getting glitchier but I figured it was something I’d done during one of my forays into writing code. I’m a terrible hack and it’s a wonder that my code doesn’t cause machines to burst into flame. 

(I’ve actually seen that; a machine bursting into flame, but it wasn’t due to my poor coding skills. Another story for another time.)

My computer told me it was having problems when the camera failed.  I probably wouldn’t have noticed for a long time except that I wanted to make a FaceTime call and couldn’t.  As I investigated I came to the conclusion that whatever the problem was, it was something that I couldn’t fix without help.

This led to the call to Apple. During that call, I discovered that the internal diagnostics were apparently corrupted and the Apple support person said I needed to return my baby to the Mother Ship.  The internal diagnostics are part of the firmware of the machine. If they’re not available, it suggests that something really bad has happened to the firmware which means it’s sort of amazing that the computer is still booting or running.

This unexpected turn of events led to a mad dash to backup everything, and finish then publish some things I’ve been working on riky-fuckin-tick.

Which explains my lack of posting. I’m writing this post on my iPad. My computer is expected back sometime next week.

I have a love – hate relationship with iTunes, the application running on my computer, not the store.

Mostly I think it’s a hate relationship but I’m willing to give it the benefit of the doubt.

When iTunes works I’m happy with it although I’ll admit in the most recent iterations I’ve become very distrustful of the application and am more likely to listen to music from my iPad or iPhone.

Distrustful? Why you ask?

I fully expect iTunes to crash at least once, if not two or three times a day depending on what I’m doing. Three times if I’m downloading a video from the cloud.

If it were just the application crashing I’d probably be ok with it. But it has a very nasty habit of taking my entire system down.  First iTunes becomes unresponsive, but if you’re listening to music you might not notice because it’s continuing to play.

You’ll find out though when you try to save a file in another application, or try to open a webpage, or another application or file. Then and only then will you realize just how well and truly fucked you are.

In my case, to regain control, I have to disconnect the USB, and External monitor. Then I have to pull the laptop from it’s cradle, then I have to press and hold the power button.

I shouldn’t have to do all this but by the time you notice symptoms, the OS is so corrupt and the CPUs are so busy that they’re no longer processing any user input.

Then the computer informs me that I shut it down because of a crash and asks do I want to reopen the applications that were running? UHHH NO! Since that’s how we came to be in this situation in the first place.

After the reboot things are usually pretty normal and it’s only very rarely that I have lingering issues.

Sunday is a case in point.

iTunes was up, I’d been syncing my iPad and iPhone then I was chatting with a friend on the phone, and at some point asked my computer to do something.

Locked up! Zero response.

Aww shit! How much of what I was working on got saved? Doesn’t matter… The reboot is inevitable, might as well press the button.

When the system came back, it still wasn’t right, Four reboots, a permissions repair, and a trip through recovery disk, and safe boot later. My computer came back mostly normal.

But then again, maybe not.

Slightly over a year ago, I wrote a blog piece explaining that Adobe was going to a subscription model, and why I personally was uncomfortable with that model.

You can read the original piece here.

Yesterday, Adobe’s cloud blew up.

I was blissfully unaware because I have only local copies of Creative Suite and Lightroom. I haven’t signed up for the subscription services and don’t use Adobe’s Cloud.

The chatter on the net was that lots of people couldn’t work because the Adobe Cloud service couldn’t log them in. This single point of failure, resulted in their software being disabled.

I never anticipated that as a failure mechanism. I honestly expected a failure to occur with the download of the application or it’s updates.

In the original piece I did question what happened when the application “Phoned Home”

Does the software degrade? Or does the software continue to work until the next time it phones the mother ship then self destruct?

I’ve got my answer. Without verification, the software stops working altogether. NICE!

I’m glad I didn’t drink the kool-aid. I’ll hang onto my local copies of Creative Suite and never connect any of the programs contained therein to Adobe’s Cloud.

I’m very content having software that works because my license key is local.

I do wonder if it’s time for me to start looking hard at other alternatives to Adobe.