iMatt :: The Blog of Matt Clare

New iPod in 6 Days, that’s 4 work days. At this time last week I wasn’t reloading my iPod I was scrambling to back it up.

I don’t want to garner the label of Mac Apologist (have I mentioned how much I hate OS9?), and I defiantly wish my first iPod had just worked; but I’m impressed with how fast the new iPod arrived and the limited hassle and updates I received in the process.

I’ve got 60G+ of music because I digitize everything, so getting the music back is not a problem. What I do wish I had was my playlists and song ratings.

I’d also forgotten the caution the iPod gave me when I first got it. Oops.

This is Wednesday’s Ontario farmer’s (well, the Lanark Landowners Association’s) protest map towards downtown Toronto. Ontario farmer’s plan to drive this route with their tractors to make a point about the economic viability of Ontario farms and the level of farm subsidies in Ontario.

This is a better protest map that would direct their concerns to those who can affect chages: the US Congress & Senate, who are the real problems with farm subsidies .

You can get more info on the Lanark Landowners Association here

(Maps by Google)

I heard Sheila Rogers give this quote on the CBC today:

Charlotte Whitton (1896-1975), former mayor of Ottawa once said, “Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good. Luckily, this is not difficult.”

On the weekend I had to come into work because our development server (which I won’t give the DNS of) started to have data coruption issues. We had recently uprgraded the drives from a pair of 40Gs to 120Gs. In this graduated process we started with just moving the information onto the new drives then from there running it off one drive for a week or so and then rebuilding the RAID1 system (two drives working as one, with one as an instant backup).

The RAID build gave a great failure at 100% error. I had assumed we could leave it for the weekend and give it another go on Monday. Apparently not. The data on it started corupting and the drives were throwing short.

So I came in, backed up what had changed since it’s tape backup. Swapped one of the drives for another of the same type/size. Reinstalled RedHat AS3 on it twice – still getting drive errors. FINALLY it occured to me, the 14′ drive cables we bought to facilitate the size of that case and it’s moving drive bay. Swaped the 14′s for 12′ – solved all the problems. Started the long process of restoring over 100MB network card.

But really, who ever hears or gives adivce: “14′ cables work well, but just don’t use two, your computer doesn’t have the power to cover that kind of distance” You hear about bad drives, boards, or even broken cables – but cables that are too long to be paired? That’s a new one for me.

Have you considered trying Linux?

Here’s a good flash animation of what that’s like. I’ll put a posting up soon on why I’m angry with a certain linux server.

www.olene.net/linux.html

Also, here’s another flash he did on switch from Windows to Mac (a little more positive)

olene.net/switch