Well, the title sounded better than the actual raw numbers. Friday starts the “Nick’s traveling like a loon” season – in 37 days, I’ll fly 43,390 miles. Granted, 15,000 of that is the India trip, but there’ll be a lot of long boring flights to non-glamorous places. I might send out a few postcards, mainly to entertain a few people as a joke so you all can laugh at me.
October, 2007
29
Oct 07
Installing Leopard
Because I haven’t learned my lesson and realizing that I should have never deviated from Dell or Lenovo when buying laptops, I decided that I’d get a copy of Leopard, the next 10.X revision for Apple and install it on my oft-repaired Macbook.
First attempt: Boot off of DVD, it fails to see that I have a hard drive. Awesome. Reboot the laptop and try again. Now it sees I have a hard drive. I select upgrade, because it’s supposedly so painless and awesome!
A little more than an hour goes by (I am rewatching downloads of Season 4 of The Wire) and it finally reboots. Blammo, blue screen. It’s not like the fearsome blue screen of death from 1998 when Windows would crash indiscriminately. Fuck.
Second attempt: Since I don’t know better, I tried to do a reinstall. Another hour goes by. I’m getting progressively pissed, not only because I’m wasting my time, but the whole hunt of Marlo Stansfield is just building – then blammo. The season is almost over. I can’t wait until January.
Reboot. Blue screen is still there. Qué surprise. Tried the Apple workaround (step 2). No go. Now I’m kicking myself for not doing a clean install.
I’m 3 hours into the upgrade process now. By this time with Vista, I was done 2 hours ago and was almost finish reinstalling core applications. Now I’m thinking about the acceleration of gravity when applied to a Macbook from 20 stories up.
Third attempt: Installed Leopard, but this time do a flat archive. At this point, I just want to do data recover and fuck everything else. I’ll format and install clean if I can. After a long few minutes, it boots up! HOLY SHIT IT BOOTS!
I’m nearly 5 hours into the install and running out of caffeine to stay awake and finish this. But I must.
Now it’s time to fire up my applications. Things are slow. I don’t know where the hold up is. I don’t know if OS X precaches apps or not, still, I’m not going to bed until this is finished.
First impressions: I hate this dock.
Second impressions: Camino and AdiumX looks awful under this UI.
Funny thing: 68kb jpg and 2 – 20k docs on my NAS? Leopard reports them as 1MB each. Hmm.
Issues list:
1) VMWare Fusion’s NAT bridge isn’t working anymore for me. So much for me working on work stuff on my Mac. Sorry boss!
SIX HOURS LATER: I think things are ok. The thing is faster now that stupid Spotlight is finishing indexing. I snagged Monolingual to remove most of the languages from OS X. I mean, I can’t think that I’m going to have a need for Tamil or other awesome languages like that.
I’m going to bed. Screw Apple. Leopard is a disappointment.
26
Oct 07
Hawkins in India
As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a closet GIS nerd, so I decided to create a Google Maps mashup of the upcoming trip to India. I’m still working on it, so check back often.
26
Oct 07
Something Gibraltar related that probably only matters to me
Gibraltar’s being shafted when it comes to air travel as of late. Iberia’s cut the Madrid to Gibraltar service since it “wasn’t profitable” (which I think is BS). Too bad, I was looking forward to taking a flight from Madrid versus the hell that is known as London Heathrow (or its ugly stepsister, London Gatwick) the next time I go.
So EasyJet has acquired GB Airways, which was a BA subsidiary airline and will take over some pretty cool routes into Northern Africa and the Canary and Madeira Islands. Awesome. I flew EasyJet from Berlin to Tallinn earlier this year, and I liked it. I felt good about the airline and the service and I’d be happy to fly them again.
Flying into Gib is quite an adventure. You get the impression that when you land that you’ve landed long and the pilot slams on the breaks to keep you from ending up in the drink. Once you’re fine, then you have a laugh and deplane via stairs and enjoy the quirk that is Gibraltar. I’d hate to see that given up, but I feel better that EasyJet will take over.
25
Oct 07
The Hawkins 7: Interesting anecdotes and random stuff from this week
1) When playing trivia, you’ll get made fun of for making up the Greek god “Testicles.” C’mon. It sounds like it *could* be a god.
2) I’m pretty sure that all of my friends are now not shocked when I text them “So what are you wearing?” jokingly.
3) My conversion to the Blackberry Curve as my phone du jour has gone over seamlessly. I fucking love this thing. Well, for now.
4) I’ve decided that if I win the organization’s hand washing contest and get $1000 as the first place winner, I should turn it down out of principle. I mean, if I win, that means I trolled the entire organization, which is pretty darn sweet. That should be good enough.
5) You know you’re hitting the slide towards metrosexuality when you get up every morning and thinking “oooh I need a mango smoothie!”
6) I started being an intelligent traveler (for once) and am going through the process of scanning all my travel docs and all vital stuff so in the event that I do lose my passport and everything, I’m not totally screwed. PDFs and secure USB drives make for a good friend. I think that this deserves a future post.
7) I’m thinking that in 2008 I should have contests to make you figure out where I’m going. The winner gets a shirt or something obnoxious.
25
Oct 07
My week is great
lol.
1) My Macbook is flickering. Again. Seriously, this is like the 6th time it’s happened and I’ve been promised that it’s been fixed. I’m not even asking for Apple to make Lenovo Thinkpad quality notebooks, but damn – fix my shit! (Glad I bought the 3 year warranty). Jackie witnessed this, so I’m not making it up. Fuck. It makes me want to rush out to the Apple store and buy Leopard.
2) Getting your camera gear insured is a pain in the ass, but I’m glad I’ve done it. The spreadsheet with my serial numbers is online, so in the hopefully unlikely event of theft, I can give an awesome report to the police and get my stuff replaced after a not too bad deductible.
3) I got a last minute cancellation on a date and got the “we should just be friends” treatment too from someone else. Let me tell you – dating in a major city is fucking horrible. All of you married people should thank your lucky stars that you’re not in a high pressure dating environment.
4) I’m losing weight but not exercising (I’ve been bad about not getting an indoor trainer for my bike), so as Drew says “you probably have AIDS.”
5) I’m getting back on my normal poor sleep schedule, which is reassuring. The downside is that my building has central heat/air and although living 20 stories up makes for a good view, stupid heat tends to rise and making it uncomfortable. The City of Chicago, for all logic, mandates buildings with x amount of people to be able to provide heat after a certain date. So it’s back to using fans from Walgreens until the weather gets cooler.
But hey, it’s Halloween this weekend. If it’s like this year, I can whore it up by somewhat dressing up and crashing Halloween parties. No one questions a guy with an expensive camera and a smile.
23
Oct 07
31 days until
I am on a plane for India. I’m excited, mainly because I’ve been burning the candle at both ends and am ready for a little fun of running around and enjoying myself. I’m not sure if a Chicken Maharja Mac is on the things to do, but Pizza Hut sure is.
All kidding aside, I’m looking forward to going.
17
Oct 07
600,000 to go
I crossed the 1.4 million mile barrier on American Airlines (lifetime accumulation), leaving me 600,000 miles short of lifetime Platinum status. All of this in under 6 years. I rule.
I spent ~230k of those miles this year, so effectively I’m down to 400k available miles. By the end of the calendar year, I’ll be at 1.5 million lifetime and 500k available.
So you’ll inevitably mock me for my mile obsession, except when people reap the benefits of free airfare. Then they understand the method to my madness. But the madness has rewards. For example, if in 2008 I wanted to do things like hunt wolverines in Alaska, go backpacking in the Hindu Kush, or even just decide to lay on the beach in Bora Bora for a while, I can easily do that with a few phone calls and really no cash out of my pocket (except for hotels, natch). It’s truly one of those things that kicks ass and I’m grateful for being able to do this, but the time’s coming where I want to be able to focus on quality trips with someone I care about.
It could be worse, but you know me – kvetching for the sake of it.
16
Oct 07
Umm, Jay…
And to think only six weeks ago, Adam Archuleta said the Bears “should make a run at being one of the best defenses ever.’’ This is the same Adam Archuleta who, like most of his flailing teammates, couldn’t have tackled Adrian Peterson if he were bound, gagged and wearing a feather boa.
I don’t even know where to start with this.
