DiskWarrior saved the day

I took my MBP to a friend's house and it started acting weird. It was very sluggish and things kept locking up. When I got home I ran Disk Utility and found that I had all kinds of permissions problems, and a "Sibling Link Error" that could not be repaired. I Googled the error and tried several options but nothing worked. One of the suggestions that kept coming up was to purchase Disk Warrior. I went to their site and read all of these user emails that claimed that Disk Warrior was incredible. They actually sounded like the company wrote them so I figured it was just marketing. I was skeptical, but I gave it a shot.

At $99 I knew I was rolling the dice but I had no other option. This is a relatively new 500GB disk that I put in my MacBook Pro, and I didn't want to have to reformat. Reformatting is easy, but I'm running PGP Whole Disk Encryption. If I reformatted I would have had to re-encrypt the drive and that takes about 24 hours. So, I went for the $99 solution and it worked. I couldn't believe it. Normally these types of software solutions don't really work, but Disk Warrior actually fixed the drive and it has been running smoothly ever since.

There is a chance that the drive is actually going bad which is why I had a problem in the first place. It could be that Disk Warrior just bought me some time. Normally when drives go bad you hear something though, and I hear nothing. My drive has been running smoothly for several days now so I'm fairly confident it's fine.

Do I think the $99 was worth it? Probably, but I still think it's an overpriced piece of software. They should really charge $49 for it in my opinion. It did work though. I'm a believer in Disk Warrior now!

Time Machine backup error solved, for me anyway

I purchased a new Seagate 500 GB FreeAgent USB drive thinking I would simply clone my MacBook Pro's HD. I've done it in the past and it worked like a charm, but this time I thought I'd try Time Machine. I have never been able to get Time Machine to work wirelessly, so I basically gave up on it. When I plugged in my external drive and ran Time Machine it went for a couple hours (trying to backup about 300gb of data) then stopped with the following error: "Unable to complete backup. An error occurred while copying files to the backup volume."



I Googled "Time Machine Error" and there were tons of people with the same problem. This topic in Apple's Forums had several people complaining of the same issue.

I tried several suggestions like the following:

• Renaming my Backup HD to not include spaces in the name.
  
• Rename my MBP to not include odd character's in its name
  
• Delete the "in progress" file on the backup drive
  
• Reformat my external drive
  
• Check the drive for errors
  
• Reboot the OS
  

None of these worked. What I did next was look at the system log by launching the Console. It's not easy to read so I downloaded these two programs to help:

• Time Machine Error Logger
  
• Time Machine Buddy Widget
  

By looking at the logs through these programs it was obvious that I had one file that could not be copied for some reason. It was a mp4 file of a movie (A Few Good Men). I went to the Time Machine options and excluded that file, ran the backup again, and it worked like a charm.

A couple of things trouble me about this error. First of all, without downloading third party software the error message that Time Machine is of no use. I had no idea why my backup stopped. Secondly, why can't Time Machine just exclude that file and continue while notifying me, or prompt me and give me a choice to continue or not?

In any case I finally got my backup to work. I hope this helps someone.

Brett Favre just doesn't want to go to training camp

Are you as sick of the Brett Favre stories as I am? He's at the end of a long career, can no longer do what he used to do, fades towards the end of the season, and yet he's still a story. The constant retiring and un-retiring is covered in the press as indecisiveness, but it appears to me that he simply doesn't want to have to go to training camp. Maybe he thinks he's above it or something. Either way, although he's free to do what he wants, I'm tired of hearing about it.

Next...

Gmail contact picture problem

I've been having a problem in Gmail where my contact picture was not being saved. It would be there for the session, but if I changed computers or browsers my contact picture would be reset to an old photo that I don't even remember uploading.

Searching for answers yielded nothing but I finally figured something out. I clicked the "older version" link in Gmail. Once in the older version I deleted my contact picture and reuploaded a new one. I saved the new photo and when I went back to the "newer version" all seems fine.

Gmail must have an issue in the "newer version" even though it doesn't seem all that new. I hope this helps someone.

UPDATE: This is not a permanent fix. After a day or so my contact picture was deleted again. C'mon Gmail.

Real Life Twitter

This video says it all.

There is no such thing as unbiased News

Are you a CNN person or a FoxNews person? Either way, you're not really getting real unbiased news. Instead of experienced journalists giving us news, we get biased "infotainment" these days. Different networks target different audiences and bring the biased news they feel their audience wants to hear. In the old days real reporters went out and investigated stories, then came back and told us what they found. These days, a pretty face reads stories they think we want to hear off a teleprompter, and the broadcast includes lots of music, flashy graphics, and so-called news alerts. CNN and MSNBC are definitely left of center, while FoxNews is definitely right of center.

It used to be that conservatives felt that mainstream media was biased to the left. They were probably right as most journalists are left of center, but they were just slightly left of center. Since the arrival of FoxNews, other networks have drifted further left to distinguish themselves from Fox, and Fox has drifted to the right. Now, nobody is in the middle.

I find that FoxNews is less biased than other networks for the simple fact that they present both sides even though most of the hosts are right of center. On other networks, the hosts are left of center and they don't provide any opposing view.

What I find troubling about Fox is the way they package the news with music. Since when do we need music for news? I'm so sick of FoxNews Alerts too because they keep running them over and over as if some major piece of news is breaking. Instead it's usually something silly like a car chase, or the arrest of a murder suspect, or something else supposedly tantalizing.

So where do we turn? How can we get nothing but the facts? The simple truth is we can't. Until things change dramatically we'll have to take everything we see on Television with a grain of salt. Someone needs to give us the straight up news and stop giving us what they think we want to hear. That cannot happen because the sad truth is the job of media is not to give us news. Their job is to sell advertising and in order to do that they need to be as popular as they can be.

Firefox + Yahoo Mail = Problems

For the past few weeks I've been having problems with Firefox. I thought it was a Flash issue so I uninstalled and reinstalled Flash. All seemed well, but now every time I go to Yahoo Mail Firefox is sluggish and draggy until I quit and restart it. If I don't visit Yahoo Mail I'm fine. Weird.

Jack Kemp - What a Good Guy

Jack Kemp was such a great guy that it's hard to find anyone who didn't like him. You can find people who argued with him, but everyone liked Jack Kemp. He was just a nice guy.

I didn't know Mr. Kemp, but I did share an elevator with him once in Orlando. He was speaking with several young people in front of the elevator while my brother and I waited for the same elevator. He was exactly the same in person and the guy you see on TV. He was electric and animated and it seemed like there was a spotlight on him. Perhaps it was just the white hair and his pressed white shirt and bright blue tie. Whatever it was, he was unique.

I had no idea he was sick and his death came as such a shock. I'll simply say, we need more people in the world like Jack Kemp.

Arlen Specter should retire

Arlen Specter's defection to the Democratic Party is troubling because he is only looking out for himself. Doesn't anyone care that our politicians only care about themselves, and not the people they represent?

Mr. Specter is 79 years old and has been in the senate a very long time. Why not just retire? I was on a flight with Mr. Specter from Philadelphia to Chicago last year and I was shocked at how old he looked. On TV he looks good, but in the airport he walked very slowly and was hunched over like an old man. Why can't he just let go and retire? Ego, lust for power, and greed come to mind. In any other profession people would expect him to retire but in politics, we accept just about anything.

Mr. Specter admits that he was about to lose a Republican primary race so he simply switched parties to save his own butt. Joe Lieberman did a similar thing last year when he switched to become an independent. Why do the American people put up with this kind of behavior? We need to stop electing people on celebrity and popularity. We need to elect leaders with skills. We've already elected a President based on celebrity and now we have an ex-Senator as President, an ex-Senator as Vice President, and an ex-First Lady who became an ex-Senator as Secretary of State. What have all these senators brought us? A big mess. We need people who have actually run something to lead our government. Instead we just settle on a popularity contest.

Oh well, Arlen Specter is just another example of a politician looking out for himself. I have an idea for all the politicians out there. Get a real job like the rest of us.

Best political cartoon ever?

Someone sent this to me in an email. It speaks for itself.

Obama agrees with Bush after blasting him in the campaign

What can I say, Obama is just like every other politician. He's full of it. After blasting President Bush and accusing him of "undermined the Constitution," President Obama now realizes that President Bush was correct in keeping the secrets around the Terrorist Surveillance program and is fighting the same lawsuit that President Bush fought. What does this prove? It proves that we cannot trust what candidates say in a campaign. Obama did not have all the facts in the campaign yet he chose to blast Bush for things he now agrees with. He took cheap shots at Bush for political gain.

Read the article for the particulars, but the bottom line is we need to stop electing people based on celebrity, and what they say in a campaign. We need to elect people who have a record of accomplishments. Most Senators don't have to run anything so they don't make good managers. We need to elect someone who has done something like run a state, or a military department, or a small or large business. Someone who knows what they are doing.

Whether you are conservative or liberal, please vote for people based on a record of accomplishments and not celebrity or campaign rhetoric.

[ Related Link ]

A Few Things Mac Should Do Like Windows

I know what you're thinking. "Are you crazy? Mac is so much better than Windows." That may be true, but there are a few things that I wish my Mac could do the way Windows does it.

1. Alt + Tab
I really miss my Alt + Tab keystrokes in Windows. I got it to work on my Mac with a third party program called Witch, but it should be built in to the OS. You can do a Command + Tab in Mac OS X, but that doesn't bring up a program that may be running but is minimized to the Dock.

2. Apple Menu as Start Menu
Wasn't there an Apple Menu in the old Mac OS's that acted like the Windows Start Menu? Sometimes I want to be able to launch a program from a menu and not from the Dock. I downloaded a program called Butler to make it happen, but again it should be built into the OS.

3. Menus appear in Window
I don't like the way Mac has one master menu at the top of the screen that changes as you change applications. I think it makes much more sense to have a menu in each window.

4. Ability to Move the Apple Menu
This may be possible, but I don't know of a way to do it What if I want the menu on the bottom of the screen? I don't, but somebody might want that.

5. Stop relying on applications like iPhoto
I prefer to browser my pictures in the Finder window and not in iPhoto. I can do that on my Mac, but if I'm trying to import a photo into an iMovie project I can't just grab it from a folder. I have to import it into iPhoto first. That's lame.

6. Write to NTFS drives natively
I really wish Mac would support writing to NTFS drives more easily. I can write to them with a third party hack, or by placing the drive on my network but it would be much easier to be able to plug in an external drive and write to it.

7. Permanently delete files without the trash
There is no easy way to delete a file from your desktop (or anywhere else) without first placing it in the Trash. I like to keep some files in Trash in case I need them, but other large files I want to delete immediately. There's no easy way to do it on the Mac. The way I do it now is to drop it on the Shredder, but that takes awhile. I also launch Terminal and type the command:

rm -f -r

and then drag the file that I want into the Terminal window. That gets rid of the file but it shouldn't be that difficult. Holding Shift +Del in Windows gets rid of the file immediately.

8. Delete Key
I don't like that there is no delete key in Mac. Holding down Function with the Delete key works, but that's an extra stroke that would be made easier with a delete key.

9. Clicking in the address bar of an Internet browser
I don't like the way Mac selects text in my Internet browser. In Windows, if I click in the address field the entire field is selected automatically so I can simply type a new address. I Mac, I click in the address field and the cursor is at the beginning of the line. A double-click then selects what Mac perceives to be a word and I have to triple click to get the whole thing selected. Lame.

10. Home Key
I miss the home key. Sometimes I want to select a line of text and in Windows I can hold down Shift + Home to do it. In Mac you can do it with Shift + Command + Arrow Key, but I've found that it doesn't always work. It seems to be application specific and some apps don't support it for some reason.