25th Sep 2003
Computer Jealousy
| Earlier this morning, I was going to entitle today’s entry something akin to “Apples”, but then had one of those “oh no, not now” moments. One of those Tech Freak Outs. I got a new 17″ Powerbook yesterday, and spent lots of time configuring a development environment, and otherwise bringing it up to speed. Another computer in my house seemed to take exeption to this … You have to bear in mind that I just saw The Godfather, and was up way too late last night watching The Godfather, Part II. Could the vibes from a movie turn my study into a Silicon Sicily? Stage set now? Ok then. |
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Like I said, I spent lots of time on “Manhattan”, my new PowerBook, setting up things like MySQL, PHP, Fink, my usual Mac OS X environment, and so on. This Mac is awesome. For you Crystal Method fans, It’s Wild, Sweet, And Cool. I had Joy mixed in with a sense that the trip to New York looms ever higher on the horizon of my calendar, and there’s tons of stuff to attend to (yes, I know I’m writing a blog entry - I can stream of conscious this out in 10 minutes, so like, dontcha interrupt me Scooter!)
Rewind two days. A goal of mine is to show FlexiPhoto running on TWO laptops, doing the Wifi thing with each other, Linux and Mac OS X. I spent some time ditching Red Hat on my Toshiba 3110 laptop, so that I could feed it some Debian. Astute 3110 afficionados will immediately flash on the “whoa, hardly anyone buys the insanely expensive Toshiba external CDROM drive for that!”. That’s right, I don’t have one of those, so booting off of a CDROM was out of the question. It does have a floppy drive …
… and so does my main Linux box, Germany, which I used to make a couple of boot floppies for the Toshiba … being temporarily thrown off by the fact that “rescue.bin” is a boot disk, and “root.bin” isn’t. That made me create extra floppies, as I started wondering if I had a couple of bad ones. The weakest part of Debian is the install, and the docs for it.
Fast Forward. Bleary-eyed 3 hour sleep grey morning old coffee sawdust granola. Went to boot Germany, walked out of the study, came back.
Hmm, still booting. Wait. Isn’t that the initial Nvidia graphics card identifier screen? Ok, watch. More messages. Wait. Isn’t that the initial Nvidia graphics card identifier screen? Oh oh.
Now, being a somewhat experienced Silverback, I have cross-backups of my development stuff. Off-site, even.
Still, having a machine not boot, right before a trip, and right after I got a new machine, and right after thinking about all of the treachery in The Godfather … well, it just doesn’t seem bloody likely, right? Gotta be something else, right?
And so it was - I had left a floppy in Germany (from the whole Toshiba/Debian party), and that floppy wasn’t one of those nice bootable kids from a good family. No error messages, either. Germany would have looped all day. Eject it. Boot. Relief!
