Capricious Me

Well, still no luck yet. I’ve backed up my data and am going to reinstall the OS. Here’s what I tried to do:
1. Boot from install disc and run disk utilities. No luck.
2. Use gParted to create a partition. This worked, but boot camp still refused to work and disk utilities refused to let me merge the two partitions.

Maybe it’s not that OSX is dumb. Maybe this really is a feature, you know, to prevent people from installing Windows on their laptops. Maybe Apple makes its own hardware and so closely guards the secrets because the hardware is PSYCHIC and can recognize intentions. “Detecting WINDOWS and LINUX intentions… throw errors, throw errors!!”

I was THIS close to installing ubuntu over OSX instead. Still can’t think of a good reason not to (except I only had Kubuntu 6.10 instead of 9.10 at home).

UPDATE: I reinstalled Snow Leopard after erasing the drive. Eagerly opened up Boot Camp only to find the increasingly frustrating, “Some Files Could Not Be Moved” error. You’ve sealed your fate, Snow Leopard. Your territory is about to get a lot smaller. Make way for a Karmic Koala! and his frenemy, Windows, courtesy of rEFIt.

http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/201001130024 (first read on the Lede Blog at nytimes.com)

I’ll summarize: Pat Robertson claims that the earthquake, which most people believe to be a seismic event that happened because Haiti is located on a fault line, is in fact the result of God punishing them for making a pact with the devil. Oh yes. I kid you not.

Disgusting, right? What an ugly example of religious fervor and self-righteousness.

The lie that is “It Just works!” has struck again. No disk defrag utilities are shipped with OSX because, you know, the Mac OS is brilliant enough to perform its own optimizations in such a way that you don’t have to defrag. Why should the user ever need to manually do such a thing? It’s a Mac… it just works!!!

BULLSHIT.

I need to defrag my hard drive and I don’t want to pay for some 3rd party software when it should be included as a utility, as it is in Windows. I currently have about 80gb of free space and I’m trying to create a rather modestly sized 32gb partition for windows using boot camp. The error message I get is that there are some files which cannot be moved. Which files are these? The oh so minimalist stylish error message could not be bothered to point them out. Googling pointed out that this might be a fragmentation problem. I tried to manually partition the drive using their disk utility as sort of a forced “clear out this continuous block of space for me.” This time, the error message was “Not enough space.” Right. Not enough space in 80gb of free space for a 32gb partition?? REALLY? Wouldn’t you think that the OS would be smart enough to realize that 80 is greater than 32 and that maybe it’s time to do some of that so called built in “optimization” that makes defragmentation unnecessary?? Why doesn’t it just work like that?

Do you know what the official apple page says about what to do if you think you need to defrag? They suggest, and I paraphrase, 1. Reboot. 2. Make a backup of your hard drive and REINSTALL the OS. 3. Use a 3rd party tool.

I’d say that I’ve dualbooted and partitioned many a machine/hard drive on Linux and in Windows, and in the past, on this Mac. Never before have I encountered such a mind-numbingly stupid and completely avoidable situation.

On a related note – if you can think of another solution that doesn’t involve backing up everything and reinstalling, please let me know.

Oh yes, so this is sort of old news, but Toyota has issued a recall for something like 38 million vehicles because they contain floor mats which could jam the accelerator and lead to fatal crashes. The 2010 Prius is not in that list, but I’m paranoid enough to think that that’s merely because not enough people have the vehicle yet.

They want me to pay 200 on top of MSRP for pieces of rubber which could lead to my demise? Thank you, but I’d rather die from a bacon overdose if you don’t mind.

And here’s hoping I made the right call in waiting for the dark gray prius instead of settling for a dark blue one today…

Who the hell do these asshats think they are, charging 200 dollars for floormats? It’s a piece of rubber that you step on. $200. Really?? REALLY? I mean, do these floor mats massage your feet and self clean or something? Are they perhaps coated in teflon and, in an emergency or accident, magically protect you from harm?

No. They’re ordinary pieces of rubber that are meant to catch the dirt. So why… WHY IN THE NAME OF ANYTHING REASONABLE would I pay $200???

I thought I had my heart set on Winter Metallic Gray for the 2010 Prius, but now I’m having second thoughts and considering the Barcelona Red…

Why don’t they have one that’s mostly gray or white with lime green accents? (Because I’d probably regret it in a few years, but in my love for all things lime green phase, I am blind to sense.)

And traffic was awful today. A commute that should have taken me 10 min at most took more than half an hour. Most of the hold up was due to the fact that they shut down one lane of Page Mill, really close to where the Alma traffic merges on to it… (That area’s already a bottleneck for traffic.) I should have just WALKED.

As a Macbook pro owner, I do try to use some of the Apple software that they try, not so subtly, to ram down my throat. Some of these include Quicktime, which is a piece of shit, but is apparently crucial to Itunes, yet another pile of steaming turds. When you install Itunes, it inevitably wants to install Bonjour and Mobileme and Quicktime. All I want to do is transfer some music to my iPod. I don’t need those other little floaters that add bloat!! But I digress… after all, the subject of my fury today is Safari.
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Why does Apple put 2 different graphics cards in the macbook pro rather than putting 2 of the same, so that you can take advantage of SLI?

It’s retarded. A 9400gt and 9600gt. You can only use one at the same time. They could have made a killing off gamers who want a pretty laptop for games… after all, those gamers can always dualboot to windows for games. Or actually, why don’t they enable SLI mode at all? It’s still possible. It just means both run like 9400gt cards, if what I learned is correct.

Bah. What potential. Wasted.

It seems, as this point, that unless the few millions of uncounted votes contain at least 500000 more votes against proposition 8 than for it, California will have added to its constitution an amendment banning gay marriage. An Amendment to the State Constitution of CALIFORNIA.

What is it about giving marriage licenses to gay couples that offends and provokes such a visceral response? Protecting the sanctity of marriage? Why not ban divorce? Protecting children from being taught about gay marriage? Um… schools are not required to teach children anything about gay marriage. Children are not as dumb as you’d think, although they are certainly not as smart as many parents would hope they’d be. How does this benefit you? It doesn’t, except perhaps you can be smug about denying a right to another group. Does it suddenly change your life if a gay couple living together for years now possess a marriage certificate? They won’t be holding their wedding on your front lawn. They won’t be flaunting their relationship to your children in schools. It’s merely a piece of paper and you would begrudge them that?

The irony is that a lot of the money supporting prop 8 came from the Mormon church, which so clearly upheld the ideals of marriage as a union between one man and one woman so well through out the years. Let’s face it. The state should not meddle with the religious definition of marriage, so if a particular church doesn’t want to marry a gay couple, so be it. However, marriage as it is interpreted by the state is more like a legal contract than a holy/sacred union before whatever god you chose. Religious groups should not meddle with the state interpretation of marriage. Be divisive and turn away people from your churches, but please don’t presume to alter the law to suit your beliefs at the cost of the rights of another group.

Last night I discovered a little spider living in a corner of my kitchen. I killed it. That brings my total up to 2 spiders, 1 earwig, and 2 mosquitoes. Every night I prowl my apartment with my bug zapping racket. I’ve missed a few mosquitoes, I think, because my legs are always bitten during the night. I keep bottles of Bath and Body Works body sprays, which contain some alcohol, so that I can kill bugs and sanitize the area where they died while making the air smell like pearberry or white tea ginger.

I am Yuan, bug slayer, unless the bugs are big. In which case I’ll panic and wish for a vacuum cleaner with a powerful hose.