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.

Tony’s ok!! :) As if some earthquake could take him unawares… psh.

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.

I spent a lot more time than usual this year in Palo Alto over winter break because my cousin was visiting and Grace came for a second visit. (Personally, I think Grace should just give up the East Coast and move over here so she can eat yogurt and good asian food all the time…)

We tried out Little Sheep Hot Pot, which I’d been looking forward to for a very long time because of the promise of hot pot (duh) and 羊肉串 (lamb skewers). The hot pot was Mongolian style, supposedly, so it didn’t have the 麻辣 flavor that I’ve been craving. However, this did make the broth very drinkable. I despair of ever finding the sichuan hot pot that will make me hate and love my meal at the same time in this country.

Mike and I did the usual food visits – pho, beef noodles, sichuan, etc. My cousin, Grace and I watched K-dramas by night and went out to eat (always on the lookout for the perfect pot of 水煮鱼) and shop during the day. Not to mention, worst of all, I’ve fallen to the wiles of Torchlight.

All this means I wasn’t as productive in my own work as I wanted to be, although I did spend some time at Parc before Grace came. There’s a lot I need to do in January. It’s going to be a pretty short amount of time to do all the writing and data crunching that needs to be done in time for the Feb deadlines, but what’s life without challenges?

I think I’m too cynical to make resolutions, but I will endeavor to be a better grad student and graduate before I’m too old to remember anything before grad school.