It almost makes me giddy...

When I had my second interview at Yahoo! back in February, at one point I was in a room with about 10 designers and they asked if I had any questions. I asked why, when you go to the Yahoo! home page, do you have to click or tab down to the search field? Many sites, most notably Google, make an onLoad="foo.focus()" call so that the search field is automatically selected, so you can type your query and hit return without ever touching the mouse.

I thought the reason was because Yahoo! is very careful about using Javascript, their mantra being cross-compatability over flashy tech. But one of the designers commented that he thought it was a good idea and, sure enough, I was using Yahoo! last week and noticed that the code had made it to production. Now millions of people can save 2 more seconds in their day.

Gee...

Got a TiVo? Have system 1.3? Want System 2.0.1? Right now most people can expect to wait about two months as TiVo processes all the machines with nightly upgrades.

Want it sooner? Jump to the front of the line.

Wait time is between 1 and 5 business days. Added features include bracketing (recording a few minutes before and after a show, to make sure you don't miss it if they start a little early or later), conflict management for season passes (now you can plan to record shows that sometimes overlap, giving a priority to those shows that are more important) and a whole bunch of other stuff.

My Mac is diligently burning CD-Rs of all my current stuff before I wipe my drive. I'm making a copy of everything for off-site sotrage while I keep another copy here for near-line access...

I'm finally cracking down on responsibility for my own data. You can cut crime, you can buy car insurance, and you can wear kneepads when you rollerblade, but there's nothing like redundant multi-site daily (okay okay, weekly) backups of your critical data for making sure your data, or lack thereof, doesn't come back and bite you badly.

Oh, by the way, the disk crash took down the last four months of emails, and while my previous paranoia resulted in my having about 80% of them on a seperate unix machine, I've lost a bunch of email addresses, and will probably only dive into those email logs to grep specific data as needed, so if you've written to me in the last month or two and were awaiting a reply, please write me again!

Right now I'm copying the CD-Rs that I burned, before I reformat the drive. As it turns out, one of the CD-Rs was corrupt already, so my paranoia has already paid off.

Damn I wish CD-Rs were faster. I have Photoshop work to do.

So more than one reader has asked me what I thought of OS X and/or why I hadn't written anything up about it yet?

If you've been a long-time reader (read: over 6 months or so) you remember that I was an avid purchaser and installer of the OS X Public Beta and, though I loved the potential, I eventually removed it from my machine.

I've been waiting in the wings, watching those of my friends who have been panting for OS X and installed it immediately. After reading the press, playing with it myself, and hearing the reactions of friends, I've pretty much confirmed my initial instinct: Mac OS X is really, really cool. If I had a second OS X-able mac I'd install it in a heartbeat. As it is I'm meticulous about my mac, and whenever something doesn't work just-so I find workarounds and hacks to make it just-so. If I was using OS X right now there would be so many things that break a little that I wouldn't be able to get anything done, not because the system's unusable, but because I'd have a compulsion to fix every small thing before doing actual work.

I have a Powerbook and a Linux box on my desk, and I basically use the linux box for 'net' stuff (serving this website, browsing, having 9 shell windows open at once, all that) and the Mac for actually making things (writing papers, reading and writing email, photoshop, even coding using BBEdit). I basically rely on a small suite of applications, and until those applications are OS X native I'll probably hold off. I had several bad experiences with the 'Classic' mode in the PB version, and I'm a little gunshy about throwing in and giving it another go until Apple's confident enough to install it on new machines.

So in a nutshell, I'm totally excited about OS X, I'm really looking forward to installing it, I'm really looking forward to Mac OS X apps coming out, but I'm not going to dive in just yet.

If you want a thorough report from those who have used it, I'd recommend the Ars Technica Review of Mac OS X.

Quote of the day:

"If Pac-Man affected us as kids, we'd be running around in dark rooms, munching pills and listening to electronic music."

In honor of marchFirst's 30% layoffs, and all the other companies laying off employees left and right, sometimes without any notice that they've been laid off until their keys stop working, I'm proud to present AmIEmployedOrNot?.

Well, 14 hours, two utilities, and four drives later, I'm nearly done archiving all the data on my notebook HD, and tomorrow morning I'll wipe the drive and start installingthings from scratch. Fun, fun, fun!

Coinciding with the end of Spring Break, you can expect the end of my bloggers block as well. I have so many interesting (to me, anyhow) things to write about I've found it hard to start for fear that some sort of dam would burst. Well, at least I got Metacookie up and running for testing purposes, and the preliminary contextual inquiry and surveys I've done have yielded some fascinating insights into how the first 'release' version of Metacookie should work. I'll be tinkering with it for the next couple weeks to make it worthy, but the result should be something a lot of people will find very useful, which is, after all, what it's all about. (that, and using, well, you know, as many commas as possible)

Happy Monday everyone! At least you get an hour's extra daylight when you get off work tonight!

Well, I've managed to recover most of the files from the damaged partition, and now I'm sifting through, making sure I have everything I can get, then burning it to CD-R. Then I'll be wiping all three disk partitions and rebuilding the HD from scratch...

Fun!

A couple days ago my mac crashed and on restarting the disk check found problems that it couldn't fix. Last night it hung up again and now it won't recognize the system on the drive...

So, in addition to other plans I had today, I'll be performing a search and recovery on my hard drive, hopefully not losing months of photos, email, assignments, and all the rest.

Gotta get a backup system in place. I've been reading the CVS Pocket Reference, and I'm planning on re-reading The Pragmatic Programmer (a book which, by the way, everyone who writes code or manages people who write code should read once a year). I really should start using CVS on a regular basis for backing up and keeping version control of my files. Of course, it really works better for text-based files than binary files, but it would still be a good habit.

This reminds me of when I used to work at Dantz Development (makers of Retrospect backup software) so long ago. The tech support folks would tell stories of people who would call and say "Um, my hard drive crashed today. I just opened your box and I don't know how to get my files back..."

Now that I have a reliable CD-R drive and media is so cheap, I really have no excuse not to perform at least a weekly incremental backup...

Do you back-up your files? If your computer disappeared tomorrow, how much would it change your life in the near-term?

Anyhow, chances are I'll just be able to boot up off the system 9.1 CD and recover the files, wipe the partition, and reinstall the system. Chances are...

So how am I even writing this piece? I'm typing on my linux box which, for all its GUI shortcomings, has been running without a restart for (checking...) 81 days. It would be longer, but there was a blackout in the middle of January. I hope OS X is as stable as that. But more on that later.

I love a newly formatted computer with the latest OS. There's something so promising about it. So pure, so fast, so much space, it's like moving into a big sunny apartment.

The thing is, I also like having the chance to get all my stuff out of the old place before the demolition team comes to blow up to the ground...