Miscellaneous tech annoyances and musings…

I have to admit that I’m more than a little annoyed right now with some of my systems. I had mentioned before that my PowerBook’s video chipset had appeared to have fried itself. Somehow, though, it corrected itself and is working properly now. I have no idea why, but since trying to help Louie with an issue with his own Mac, I’ve not had any video problems. Unfortunately, in trying to fix a separate networking issue, I appear to have seriously FUBARed the networking to the point where nothing works anymore. I even managed to track down my OS X 10.4 install DVD and tried to do a reinstall of the operating system, with no success. At this point I may be forced to try another reinstall, except this time wiping out my home directory and networking settings. I’m loathe to do a wipe and reload, as I can’t seem to find the installer for the iMovie addons I bought which do watermarking of videos (which is needed for MK Online). If I can find that, a wipe/reload will work nicely for me. There isn’t anything on the PowerBook that needs to be saved as it is.

I do admit though sometimes I wish I could justify the purchase of a new MacBook, but the problem is that I don’t do enough personal travel where buying a MacBook Pro is worth it. About the only reason I take the PowerBook as opposed to the work laptop is if I need to do video editing, and of the new generation of Mac laptops, only MacBook Pros have Firewire ports. Ah, well… I’ll figure something out eventually.

On another front, I’m also miffed because I had a supply of 20/40 GB backup tapes that Sean gave me some time back, and I can’t seem to find them now. They’d be useful, considering I’m reaching the limit of the 12/24 GB tapes I’m using for backups on my server now. I’ll be checking at the office tomorrow to see we have any unused 20/40 GB tapes there, and if so if I can steal some. The sooner I can get that taken care of, the happier I’ll be.

On a final front, I’m finding I’m using my Facebook account far more than I ever did my MySpace account. I’m guessing it probably has to do with the fact that my MySpace friends are mostly online friends, while the Facebook ones are mostly rl friends (even if many are ones I’ve not seen in several years). In addition, I’m finding that I’m doing most of the quick posts like status comments and amusing videos on the Facebook, while keeping the long posts on this site. It doesn’t really bother me doing that, either; I have it set up now where announcements about blog posts get posted over to the Facebook. We’ll see how it goes from here, but for now, I have no complaints. :-)

Now I just need to get some rest, because I have a long day ahead of me tomorrow, and that doesn’t even include searching for those tapes. Fun fun…