OneMind

Well, I’m typing this on my fully restored iMac with a brand new 750G hard drive installed and working.

I went from dead in the water to a full recovery in just over 24 hours. Amazine.

AppleCare comes through again.

My almost-new 24-inch iMac died yesterday. I mean died, dude. When I came back from lunch, it was frozen. I rebooted and after several minutes I was looking at a straight terminal screen with BSD commands and messages.

In the old days — say six months ago — this would have been a disaster and an occasion for wailing and gnashing of teeth. I was able to breathe into the situation because I know I’m backed up fully with Apple’s excellent Time Machine software so no data should be lost.

So after many attempts to resuscitate the system, I gave up and called Apple’s support. Within 15 minutes we had determined that the problem was the disk hardware even though I could see the drive and get directory listings from it in BSD. Apparently the portion of the drive that boots into OS X Aqua was corrupted. A new drive is in order.

Since I have AppleCare on the system, not only is the repair covered, but they’ll send someone out to my home office to do the replacement! Woohoo!! They indicated the drive would ship today (Wednesday), reach the outfit doing the house call on Thursday and should be available to install by Friday noon. That’s great service; my local Apple dealer is quoting 3-5 days before he can even look at it and then he has to order the drive. So my system would be down for a week or longer.

This morning, the AppleCare line called and said they’d be out this afternoon between 3 and 5 to install the new drive. Unbelievable. I love people who under-promise and over-deliver. Once the new drive is in, I just have to restore my last Time Machine backup, copy over any files I modify or create on my MacBook Air during the down time, and I’m good to go.

I love my Mac. I love Apple.

Is this as telling as I think?

Barack Obama and his followers chant “Yes we can.”

Hillary Clinton’s supporters chant “Yes she will.”

Will she? Or does it take “we”?

Somehow Hillary Clinton has managed to avoid getting slammed for her promise in the ugliest debate of the campaign that if Iran attacks Israel with nuclear weapons, we would nuke Iran.

Actually, what she said didn’t require a nuclear attack by Iran; I’m giving her words the most favorable possible twist here.

She is an all-out hawk on the Middle East and for that reason alone she needs not to be the Democratic nominee for President.

Sen. Hillary Clinton won Pennsylvania tonight by a margin that was less than half her lead a few weeks ago. It’s a victory nonetheless and I don’t think the outcome should result in her deciding to drop out of the race unless she’s broke, which may be the case.

But this logic her staff and surrogates keep trying to foist off on the voters and super-delegates is starting to grind at me pretty badly.

Put as simply as possible, here’s their key “battleground states” argument.

Candidate A won State X
If Candidate B is the nominee, he will lose State X
Therefore Candidate B is unelectable

What kind of bullcrap is that? This assumes that many or most of those who supported Candidate A in this election will either stay home or vote for the Republican in the General. In other words, if I lose to a Democrat when the Democratic vote is divided between two of us, I will necessariy lose to a Republican when there’s only one Democrat in the race. On what basis is that conclusion drawn?

I’ll tell you.

It’s drawn from the certain knowledge that Obama will have more delegates, more popular vote and more state victories than Clinton. So the only way they can hope to present themselves as the winners in this brutal campaign is by changing the definition of “winner” and then fudging their own definition.

It is, indeed, as Obama says, the old-style politics.

And it’s hogwash.

I mentioned Scribus in an earlier post today. I went to download it to give it a spin but I can’t quite figure out how to get it to run on OS X without wrapping it in X11, which I refuse to do. If I wanted to run it in X11 I’d run Linux.

There’s supposed to be an Aqua port but the links are dead so I don’t know what’s going on. If you do, let me know!

Meanwhile, the adventure of trying to convert HTML table cell text to justified text in a document I can get to print in a 6×9 book format to a PDF is turning out to be far more work than I ever anticipated. I’m just about at the point of deciding to bite the bullet and manually reformat the text but it’s over 400 pages.

Every single approach I’ve tried — and I’ve tried a bunch of them including about 10 or 12 new ones today — breaks down somewhere. Some come close, but no horseshoe. This really shouldn’t be so hard, I keep telling myself.

Right.

I’m about to embark on a project that involves converting a large stack of handouts I’ve done in HTML over the years into a couple of books intended for publication both as eBooks and as dead-tree products. To do this, I need to convert these HTML files to PDFs that format properly, paginate well, look good from a type perspective, etc. In other words, I need a desktop publishing solution that plays nicely either with HTML or with some format to which I can easily convert HTML without headaches and lots of manual tweaking after the fact.

In my search, I ran into an Open Source DTP tool called Scribus that looks very promising. Some research suggests that it doesn’t swallow HTML frogs particularly well (though it may not be too bad; I’m going ot run some tests later this weekend to see, I think). But Scribus imports Open Office format (.odt) documents and, as you may know if you’ve been hanging here for a while, I use OO to the exclusion of other office programs.

So I followed a couple of links and stumbled serendipitously into a marvelously useful and helpful blog maintained by Solveig Haugland, who has a rep as one of the premier Open Office trainers and writers on the planet. Wow. That blog has taught me about 15 new things in the first hour of exploring it.

If you’re using OpenOffice (or its Mac clone NeoOffice, which I prefer and use daily), or if you’re just thinking about switching from Micro$oft Offi$e to OO or NeoOffice, you really should take time to look over this wonderful work.

I’m off now to experiment with NeoOffice Writer to see if I can produce a book-quality PDF with it, directly or by importing from it into Scribus.

Oh, and Scribus has another nice feature: it’s Python scriptable. Woohoo!

The annual TED conference is one of the premiere events on the planet that is all about ideas. “Ideas Worth Sharing” is its slogan and the videos of presentations made at TED are often among the most intriguing, thought-provoking and entertaining anywhere.

Now the folks behind TED are behind a new event called Pangea Day. On Saturday, May 10, for four hours beginning at 1800 GMT (which happens to be 11 a.m. here in Monterey), a worldwide audience of potentially millions of people at thousands of locations in 180 countries will watch a collection of 24 short films together. The intent is to help “them” become “us”, to help us discover the true common thread of humanity that runs through all races, cultures and religions.

In the Monterey area, there are two showings, one at Monterey Peninsula College and the other at something called the Punky Lil Kid Independent Film Festival. The Pangea Day web site helps you find a location near you.

I hope you will take the time to attend this one-of-a-kind event. It has been famously said that movies don’t change the world but people who watch movies do. Here’s to a world-changing experience for all of us.

A friend shared this photo with me. I don’t know if it was real or Photoshopped but it’s cool anyway. (Hey, that may be the 21st Century equivalent of “is it live or is it Memorex?”)

Smile!

There have been a number of major stories in the media lately about the failures of Microsoft’s Vista as a technology and as a product. Informal pieces I pick up from friends and colleagues seems to confirm the situation. Here’s one example from DailyTech.

But if you read a little ways into that article, you’ll see the Microsoft Spin Machine diligently at work attempting to downplay the significance of the issue:

“Fortunately for Microsoft, its competitors have failed to present a cohesive alternative, with Linux still struggling to gain marketshare, and Apple’s OS X languishing under its own problems.”

As a proof text, that paragraph links to this piece which is not about OS X woes but only about problems with Apple’s Safari Web Browser on Windows.

This is pure crap. Vista is a huge disappointment on every level. I have friends who are so pro-Microsoft they practically bleed glass, but they’re being forced to admit that they can’t rely on Vista, have to backtrack and uninstall it or at best use it on one machine for testing.

Why can’t the media just tell the unvarnished story? Why the red herring on OS X having problems that aren’t in fact OS X issues?

Idiots.