Category Archives: Uncategorized

Resurrected Mac

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Last December, I wrote about how my Early 2011 MacBook Pro died, and how I’d replaced it with a new machine. The video fritzed out while working in Photoshop, and things deteriorated until by the end of the week, it either froze at the grey screen, or progressed to a blue screen. Apparently a lot of that generation of MacBook Pros had problems with the video generation chip, and in the original post, I linked to three separate pages detailing the problems, and how, at that point, Apple hadn’t addressed the problem.

On February 20, Apple announced the MacBook Pro Repair Extension Program for Video Issues saying,

Apple has determined that a small percentage of MacBook Pro systems may exhibit distorted video, no video, or unexpected system restarts. These MacBook Pro systems were sold between February 2011 and December 2013.

Apple or an Apple Authorized Service Provider will repair affected MacBook Pro systems, free of charge.

I took the computer in to the Chestnut Hill Apple store, where a very helpful Apple Tech by the name of Dan verified the issue, and ordered the necessary replacement main logic board. When the part came in, I brought the laptop back in, and it went off for service for a few days. It came back last Wednesday, and I picked it up Friday night. It appears to be running properly, and they even replaced the battery in it, along with the main logic board, all for the price of $0.00.

I would have preferred this program had been in place last December, but I’m glad that they finally recognized the problem, and I wanted to let people know about the solution.

So what am I going to do with it?  At this point, I’m not sure. Its hard drive is still overly full, which means it’s still slow. I do like having the ability to use Mavericks again (and the Snow Leopard installation I have squirrelled away on a hard drive), but the new machine is faster, and I love its sharper screen. At the very least, I’ve gone from having a doorstop with valuable data on it that I couldn’t remove, to having a working machine that I can erase my data from, and resell.

One thing that I immediately noticed was the full title bar in Safari on Mavericks. It’s the one thing that really irritates me the most about Yosemite — you have to think and aim to find a place to drag the window around by. I don’t find the extra 50 px or so of content area to be so helpful as to outweigh the irritation of not having a proper title bar to drag the window around by.

Happy 2015!

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Happy 2015. For me, 2014 was a year of big changes: the loss of one job, and the start of a better one.

Once again, I went to First Night Last night. I started at Copley Square, and saw the ice sculptures and Grand Procession (and no, I didn’t see the protesters), then took the Green Line up to Park Street to see the ice sculptures on the Common. There were three there: one devoted to Einstein, an American Eagle, and Captain America:

Captain America Ice Sculpture

Captain America Ice Sculpture

Ice sculptures at night are hard to shoot — pictures don’t fully convey both the color and the detail simultaneously.  I suspect it would take a tripod and HDR, which would be very difficult to manage with the throngs of people there. Once I had seen the ice sculptures, it was only a short wait for the early fireworks.

After the fireworks, I walked down to Old South Church, for their “Pipes and Pops” performance on organ and brass. Once again, they opened with Also Sprach Zarathustra, AKA the 2001 Theme, and ended with a very good version of the 1812 Overture.

From there, I hurried down to the Hynes convention center to see a comedy program, “Divas After Dark”, performances by three female standup comediennes. The first and last ones were good; I thought the middle woman was more of a soccer mom than a diva — she had some good lines, but her delivery needed something.

Next up for me was some puppet improv, courtesy of the Puppet Showplace Theater. I’d never thought of Puppet Showplace as a place for grownups; these two guys were very funny.

Then came what was probably the strangest performance of the night, “Sleeping Weasel: Birth Breath, Bride Elizabeth”.  The description runs:

Revel in madness and cake in this runaway hit “lecture play,” written and directed by Kenneth Prestininzi. A deconstructed Mary Shelley/Bride of Frankenstein, performed by Stephanie Burlington Daniels, gives a wackadoodle lecture to young brides/scholars — she’s never sure which, due to her alternating bi-polar mania and verbal short circuiting.

I have to give props to Ms. Daniels – she nailed the performance, and I liked the idea of a mock lecture, but the content itself, while funny in spots, was definitely strange.

For the last show of the evening, I went back downstairs to the Puppet Showplace Theater, for the Late Night Puppet Cabaret.  This was four performers, including a shadowbox performer, and a couple of marionette performers who amazed me with what they could do.

By this point, it was quarter to twelve. I didn’t see any point in waiting around for the count down, and didn’t have the time or the inclination to get over to the waterfront for the late fireworks, so I called it a night, and headed home.

Happy New Year, everyone.

Christmas Music

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I’ve always liked Christmas music. One of the things I liked about Christmas Eve was how the radio stations would switch over to non-stop Christmas music for 24 hours. (Starting in October, like some stores and stations do now is a bit much). I bought my first iPod in late fall, and didn’t start loading it up until mid-November of that year — right at the start of the holiday season, which means I have a ton of Christmas music on my iPhone now — so much, that I had to create a Smart Playlist called “Not Christmas” for the other eleven months of the the year. Continue reading →

New Mac

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I picked up a new MacBook Pro last night. The old one, an Early 2011 Macbook Pro started crashing on me earlier this week, and by the end of the week, wouldn’t start at all. Apparently, there’s a lot of that going around. In my case, it started pretty suddenly – I was editing a scan in Photoshop, when suddenly the screen scrambled, and then the system crashed. I rebooted, verified the disk with Disk Utility and went to bed. I was just drifting off  when the computer restarted itself, by itself. Not good. Over the next few days, I saw the start up screen shifted over by a third, and another time, I saw vertical bars. By the time Thursday night rolled around, I couldn’t get past the gray startup screen, and had seen a Blue Screen of Death a couple of times. In hindsight, the fact that I couldn’t preview my TIFF scans could have been a clue too, though I put it down to an incompatibility with Mavericks.

Anyrate, after reading up about the situation, it seems like the cure would have been a motherboard replacement; this for a computer which was nearly four years old, and had been running slowly anyway. I would not have chosen right now to replace the computer– Christmas is coming up and I just spent about $1000 replacing my front brakes, but I didn’t see much choice, so I started looking at the Apple Online store, trying to choose between my options. Continue reading →

Temporal Anomalies

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I just finished retouching a scan of one of Dad’s slides from 1958. In the picture, Grandma is watching my cousin Bill, as a baby, by her living room table.

Bill and Grandma

Bill and Grandma

I was zoomed in at 100%, retouching away the dust spots and mold, moving over the picture millimeter by millimeter.

Inset of his hand

Inset of his hand

As I got to the section by his hand, I noticed he had his hand on a spent flashbulb.

If you saw one, would you even know what it was?

Back then, if you wanted to do interior photography of people, you used a flash gun with expendable glass bulbs filled with, I think, magnesium wire and oxygen that burned instantly to produce one pop of light. Dad must have used it for one of the previous pictures, set it down on the table, and the baby picked it up, as babies are wont to do.

One-shot flashbulbs were replaced with flashcubes when I was a teenager, soon to be replaced with electronic flash units, good for thousands of pictures, replacing calculations of guide numbers and distance and f/stops with automatic exposure.

It got me thinking—how much of our current everyday technology will be obsolete and unrecognizable in a few decades?