Too Many Moving Parts
I am finally getting the hang of this Mac OSX thing. And find that for all of the smooth convenience and performance that the MacBook Pro allows, things get really strange as the disk fills up close to the edge.
Most listeners know that I have gradually been moving my operation to the Mac platform. I became a switcher due to aggravation with malware maintenance on XP boxes and personal experience with Vista. My first toe into the water was a Black Friday ASUS laptop machine from Walmart – the most expensive computer I have had since the Compupro 816, once you figure in time. Three trips for warranty repair, motherboard replacement and now it seems to be more or less functional.
But I digress. The production process for SDRNews is about 2/3 OSX, 1/3 XP, with scripts on the Mac side and a few manual process details. Plus some back and forth between machines for audio files. It usually proceeds smoothly, until I get very tired and late into the early morning hours.
Publishing the HP Magic Giveaway last night put me well behind the power curve in prep and recording of the regular episode. Then around 1:30 – I went to publish the episode, and could not log in to the underlying WordPress database. Alternate login – no luck. Getting panicky – time for a call to GoDaddy support to look for unusual activity in logfiles. Nothing found. No luck login on Firefox or Safari. No luck resetting password. It’s approaching 2:30am.
I finally attempt login on an old Dell – XP Home and Firefox. The login proceeds slick as can be.
I get the episode posted (although with some manual steps that put the wrong filename in place in the enclosure field) – and that is what causes the delay
So – with the audio and video from the CMSExpo safely stashed on external Firewire drives, I have set out to get things in order on the MacBook Pro. There is about 5GB left on a 100GB drive, and the combination of OSX swap files and Protools scratchpad – OSX is gracefully dying.
It just had a senior moment, but was too polite to tell me it was sick.
A good old XP box would have served up the Blue Screen of Death weeks ago. Maybe that would have salvaged a few hours of sleep.