Where Anna the Piper geeks out
Those of you who follow me on Facebook and/or Twitter saw me live-tweeting this last night, but for those of you who follow me from the blog or LJ or DW, here’s the epic saga of Anna’s Worst Commute Ever!
My previous commute record was set back in 2006, roughly three and a half hours between 
solarbird
Wonder no more!
My laptop had been making these weird rattly noises for a while now, as well as running periodically far hotter than it seemed like it should. Replacing the hard drive didn’t help (although it did double my hard drive capacity, which of course was awesome). Neither did taking a can of electronics cleaner to the interior of the machine. So finally I decided, due to the location of the weird rattly noises I kept hearing (i.e., pretty much smack center under the keyboard), that I probably needed a new fan.
There are three places locally I found that I could have taken the box to to have a new fan installed: the actual Apple store, an unrelated chain called The Mac Store in the U-district, and a place in Shoreline that does Mac repairs. In all three cases, though, I’d have had to pay for the cost of the part as well as probably $80-100 in labor. Screw that, I decided; I’ve taken apart plenty of computers in my time, and I was pretty sure I could just install the damn fan myself.
This proved pretty much trivial thanks to ifixit.com. They’re a site specializing in repair manuals and parts for Macs and iPods, and I gotta say, the site was incredibly helpful. Not only do they have a variety of step by step manuals on how to take your Mac apart and how to install different parts, they also sell those parts for you to order. And since the new fan I ordered for Winnowill arrived today, I settled in tonight with Dara’s help to get that put in. It went very simply and without aggravation!
So I highly, highly recommend this site to any of my fellow Mac geeks out there. If you’re up for fixing anything wrong with your own computer and saving yourself the cost of paying somebody else to do it for you, check this site out. They can probably help you get the job done.
Here’s one of the good reasons to be on Facebook: a lot of my relatives who I otherwise would not be in touch with are there. One of my cousins found me there last night, letting me know that she’s putting together a memorial DVD to honor my uncle Marion who recently died and offering me a copy, which was very sweet of her. But she also has sent me a bunch of very old pictures of myself and my brothers and parents, and various other family members as well.
Including this, which is possibly the oldest picture of myself I have seen in YEARS. Good gods I am TINY. Check out that purple dress!
As y’all probably know, one of the big reasons I like to work downtown is that I get a really nice walk through Pike Place Market and along Elliott Avenue on my way to my workplace, and back again in the afternoon. Gives me a nice view of the water, and the sidewalks are wide and relatively uncrowded. Bit of a bitch during the fall and winter when it’s windy and rainy–but on gorgeous days, you can’t beat the view.
I particularly like cutting through Pike Place since the fruit vendors are friendly, and I’ve started buying fruit and veg from them, often enough that they’ve started introducing themselves to me and cutting me discounts. (That one of them is also quite cute is bonus. ;) )
Last night in particular the older gentleman who runs the table I like to stop at gave me a really nice discount, five bucks for a (huge!) Asian pear, three cute little Clementine oranges, and late season raspberries. The aforementioned cute guy was also there, and while he was talking to other customers, I happened to jump in and assure the lady from Portland that why yes, their Asian pears were awesome and I bought them all the time.
The customer lady was amused and said to Cute Guy, “And she’s not even paid! Or your girl, either!”
I can’t swear to this 100 percent, but I’m pretty sure Cute Guy said, “Not yet.” To wit, lulz. And also *^_^*;;
That was the Good Exciting part of the walk.
The Bad Exciting part of the walk was that apparently, about an hour or so before I got to the market, somebody got shot. :( I heard somebody going by me saying something about a shooting, and then after I stopped at my marketboys’ table and went around the corner to head to the bus stop, I saw the area was still taped off. There was a uniformed guy on duty and I asked him what had happened; he said he didn’t know.
So I cut through the alley between 1st and 2nd to get over to Union so that I could reach my bus stop. A woman stopped me to ask for change or cigarettes (which I couldn’t give her, although I did offer her one of my oranges), and she said as well that “some guy got shot in the head”. To wit, um, yikes.
So yeah, that was unnerving. Second and Pike is right by the market and is right along my usual walking route, and I am very, very relieved that I and llachglin
I thought I was going to have little to say on this, but apparently I was mistaken. This is what I get for this whole month being one long hammering of breast cancer breast cancer breast cancer breast cancer for me so far, and it’s not even half over yet.
All you folks asking your online friends to post status updates and/or wear pink or whatever, your hearts are in the right place, but I implore you: if you really want to do something to help fight not only breast cancer but cancer in general, then what would really be best if you donated to the cause. Find whatever means of donation works for you. I’ve already posted about the Help Felix Find a Cure campaign my workplace is running. And my local Safeway is taking donations all month; your own local grocery store may be doing the same. There are a plethora of donation options available if you expend a bit of effort to look. And consider donating to other forms of cancer research–because breast cancer isn’t the only version by a long shot, and men and women both suffer from its various forms. It was cancer of the brain that gave my mother epilepsy and ultimately killed her, so, um, yeah, been very well aware of cancer all my life.
I have been privileged to know several women both locally and online who have fought the same fight I have, or who are even currently fighting it. And I feel that for the sake of these women, the best thing I can do is to make what donations I can to the cause, as well as ask you all to consider doing the same. Updating your status on Facebook or wearing a pink shirt ultimately accomplishes very little. Throwing actual cash at actual research, however, can save lives.
Besides, Internetz, c’mon. I don’t even use a purse for the most part. I use a backpack, which ain’t nearly as sexy and girlie. And the only pink article of clothing I currently own raises a lot more awareness of Great Big Sea than it would of breast cancer, given that that’s what’s actually emblazoned on said article of clothing. Given that it is also now October, I ain’t wearing that out without wearing several layers over it, which kinda defeats the whole purpose, y’know?
Anyway. I’ve sent email to the coworker running the Felix campaign to see if I can drum up a way for non-Windows users to donate without buying the actual multimedia package. I’ve also been donating to Safeway’s efforts the last couple of times I’ve bought groceries there. Again, please consider doing the same. It’ll mean a lot more than status updates. Thanks.
It’ll probably surprise few of you that I’m actually going to have little to say what with it being Breast Cancer Awareness Month; anyone who’s read me for a while will know I’ve had plenty to say on the subject already.
However, I will spread the word about this. My workplace, Big Fish Games, is having a fundraiser to raise money for the Breast Cancer Research Foundation. We’re selling little $5 packs of multimedia downloadable goodies, including wallpapers, screensavers, and avatars. So if you like the games we sell, consider checking this fundraiser out.
You can get all the details and buy the download package right over here. Fair warning though: the download being sold is a Windows executable file, so not immediately interesting to non-Windows users. (I’ll be asking the folks at work if there are any plans to sell equivalent download packages or other goodies for the Mac users.)
FYI, all: if I know you have an active journal over on Dreamwidth, and I know you’re clearly crossposting over to here, I’ll be shifting commenting traffic there unless you have LJ content that isn’t actually on Dreamwidth. In which case you’ll still get my comment traffic on LJ. (My beloved solarbird
Is that too much to ask? Grf.
Case in point: my computer surgery from yesterday. Winnowill’s hard drive had started making disturbing, unusually loud noises when spinning up out of hibernation. This concerned me, especially given that everybody I mentioned this to said “yep, time to get a new hard drive”.
So yesterday I went out and got one, along with a new 2G RAM chip so that I could bring Sweet Winnie’s total memory up to a shiny 4G. The new hard drive was a very shiny 320G, twice the capacity of the old one.
Brought these things home, and went to work on doing the restore from my last Time Machine backup. Taking apart the machine and putting in the new RAM and drive was the easy part. As per solarbird
It went swimmingly, up until the part where I rebooted and didn’t get any further than a blue screen and a little spinning progress wheel that came and went every few seconds. To wit, um.
Tried a second pass through the entire procedure, with the same results.
Turned out I had to totally re-install Snow Leopard on the drive. Which fortunately didn’t overwrite any of my old data, but it did mean I had to re-download all of the software updates that Apple has dropped since Snow Leopard came out. Which was vexing. (And which, tangentially, led me to repro a bug in one of our games that I’ll have to be chatting with folks about at work tomorrow.)
Now the computer seems happy enough. Which is of course a perfect time for WordPress plugins to start going blooey on me. YAY! And by yay, I mean, AUGH!
So yeah, I’ve actually been doing things besides purchasing books lately, I swear!
The Great Enshrinkening of Anna proceeds apace, even if not quite as quickly as initially planned. As I enthused on Twitter and Facebook this morning, I hit 164 pounds today! Which is well and easily the lightest I’ve been in five years, and which gets me into territory before I’d started the Walk to Rivendell in 2005. (Which was when I started regularly tracking my weight.) 162 pounds is the 30 pounds lost mark. I’m still aiming for 150, so I have 14 pounds to go!
It’s a bit amusing as well to realize that if I count from my actual high point of weight last year, I’m actually down 29.5 pounds, not 28. But I’m still counting from when I actually started using the LoseIt app, so!
Work’s been a bit crazy lately since we’re hardcore face down on a huge project for the next few weeks–and my team’s having some QA shuffle going on as well, so we’re essentially down to two full-time QA people right now. But so far it’s all still good. And on Friday, we even finally got us an official Big Fish Games sign in front of our building! Check it out:
solarbirdspazzkat
I am very, very happy that the heat wave from last week has passed. I don’t mind the hot so much, but I do mind the part where I don’t sleep well in heat waves. Today was lovely, though, once the clouds cleared up, and I had a great walk down to the shops.
I should also mention that spazzkat
And speaking of GBS, NEW ALBUM COMING OUT ON TUESDAY! <3 <3 Brace for the squee, folks. You know it's coming!
Standing down from silent running for this, because I gotta admit, I’m intrigued by this problem. This is how you tell I’m a QA engineer, people: I’m intrigued by the problem to solve, rather than pissed off that a product I’ve purchased is not behaving as it should. ;)
Here’s the backstory. The other day, as y’all may remember from my (endless, I know) reports of what books I buy, I grabbed an ebook copy of Jessica Andersen’s Nightkeepers. When I pulled it down from B&N, though, I noticed that when I tried to open it up in my Mac-side eReader app, I was prompted as per usual for my name and credit card # to unlock it, and then the program immediately crashed. All subsequent attempts to open the book failed, showing me nothing but a blank page 0, and not prompting me anymore to unlock it. I noted as well that three other books purchased on the same day worked correctly.
Note also that this very same book worked absolutely correctly when I tried to open it in three other places: on my Nook, on my iPhone in the B&N app, and when I pulled it into Windows to open it on the PC version of the B&N reader program. This told me, okay, the book itself is not corrupted, it’s readable by other programs. So something about the wrapping on the book just happens to be confusing the hell out of the Mac version of the reader.
I was able to repro the problem again tonight, on three different purchases. Two of them came from the same publisher as Nightkeepers (since the first book I tried tonight was book 2 of that series, Dawnkeepers), which was Penguin. The third, Cyberabad Days by Ian McDonald, was from Pyr.
Barnes and Noble is using the same eReader app, essentially, that Fictionwise uses and which Fictionwise in turn acquired from eReader.com. The main change that B&N has made to it, at least on the Mac side, is to make it able to load epub format books. The version I’ve got is 1.1, the latest version, and the Mac version hasn’t been updated in months. So I’m quite sure that isn’t the problem.
What HAS changed with B&N lately, though, is that they’ve started making all of their downloads be epub format, whereas before they were predominantly using PDB format. So this made me think, “hrmm, so what if I go back and re-download one of my earlier PDB purchases, see if it comes down in epub, and if I can load it correctly?” I was in fact able to do that with my ebook copy of mizkit
So at this point I’m wondering a few things. One, who does the DRM wrapping? If that’s on B&N to do, it sounds like for some reason, some subset of the DRM wrapping they’re doing is breaking their version of the eReader. Two, what might have changed lately that this problem has only recently cropped up? If it’s because of the shift over to epub files, are there potentially different types of epub files they could be working with that could be breaking the reader app for some books, but not all?
I don’t know enough about the epub format to make a really solid guess, but I thought one of its major advantages was its universality. Anybody out there able to enlighten me on potential gotchas on epubs files produced by different sources?
Now I’ve got four books all exhibiting the problem, but since I’m able to read them on my Nook and iPhone, I’m way more intrigued than I am annoyed that they’re unreadable right now on my computer. It helps as well that really, reading on my Mac is maybe 10 percent of the e-reading I do, at most, so it’s not really an inconvenience, more just an intriguing problem to solve. Yep folks, if books are involved, I can even wear the QA hat when I’m not at work!