Feeling Prepared

This has not been my week.

I know--it's only Wednesday.

I walked into my office on Sunday morning to the sound of all five (or more?) fans on my G5 up at full speed. That is not a good sign. Usually this means the computer was reset for some reason--probably due to a power outage. Sure enough, there was a fire that effected several thousand people Friday night. All I remember seeing was a flicker, but I live on the other side of town.

Anyway, rebooting the computer did nothing. It gave me the usual Mac startup sound, but then nothing. Like it was stuck in neutral. No hard drive noise, no display at all. Nothing. I shut it down and tried it again, and again, and again.

On Monday I took it to the Mac store (thankfully just up the street) but the warranty had expired so to my surprise, the guy behind the desk suggested I try an authorized Apple tech in town that would save me some money over using the Apple repair.

So that's where I took it. They diagonised the issue as a faulty video card. I should have my computer tomorrow.

BUT--the thing that saved me was an external hard drive. Not just the hard drive but a little software program called SuperDuper. Months ago I set it to backup my internal hard drive. After making an initial backup of everything on the drive, every night around 11:00pm it backs up anything from the day that had changed or had been added. This keeps it very current and keeps the backup fairly short.

So, the very last chart I edited, pdf I ran off, mp3 I added on Thursday was backed up and available for me. All I had to do was plug the drive into my laptop and everything I needed was there.

The only thing I couldn't do was create charts. I didn't take the time to try to configure this computer for the midi and keyboard settings, plus, even though I had access to Finale, I could not use it to print or save since two instances of it had already been registered on two different computers.

So friends, take my advice, even though it appears my hard drive is ok, I've been without my computer all week, but not my data! It could have been a lot worse.

Favicon

I spent a good portion of this afternoon trying to be clever. It turns out, I'm not so clever.

Have you ever noticed the little icons in the location line you your browser? It's called a "favicon." The blogger template kind of comes with one, but I decided to try to put my own up there.

After digging around, I found a simple little graphics editor/creator for OS X, and I made this little icon on the right. A little more research revealed that this little icon (a favicon.ico file) is a 16X16 bit file in 4 bit colors. This means that it would not be a matter of simply reducing my original icon, but the colors would never work as well, since they are out of the scope of 16 bit colors.

So I downloaded "graphics converter" and tried to create a little 16X16 version of what you see above. It ended up looking ok, but then I couldn't get blogger to read it and incorporate it. I used code I found from a website, but as you can see, all I get is a "can't fine this file" icon. (At least that's what it looks like in Firefox).

So how does MLB.com do it? They have red white and blue (basic colors), but the resolution seems much greater than 16 bits. What about the Apple favicon? It has smooth rounded edges. I'm starting to think that the whole 16 bit thing isn't really true.

Anyone have any experience with this?

Oh yeah, is "PB" too obvious?

Church Evangelism

This is AWESOME! Thanks to Jeff for bringing it to my attention. Give it a chance. It gets better as it goes on. Kind of like a Christian Ask a Ninja.

Sounds like a train

Not to trivialize recent tornadic events around the country, but I am curious, what did they say a tornado sounds like before the train was invented?