Austin Web Designer - Adam Freetly

this weekend was still going alright as of saturday night, but sunday everything just started exploding. i'm going to leaves taxes out of this, because a) i'm unsure of the outcome just yet and b) 4's are unusual.

1: About this iBook
Photoshop and the Sims 2 have been killing the wifest's iBook for a while, so saturday she finally let me buy her more RAM. sunday morning, she installed the new stick of 512, and the ibook refused to recognize it. so, to test, we put the stick of 256 back in. suddenly it's not reading, either. so now the ibook is down from 384 MB to 128. great. meanwhile across the room...

2: Critical: Broken RAID 5
1 of my 3 hard drives fails. last time this happened was 2 years ago, which was when i decided i wanted to have RAID 5 on my home computer. having a hard drive fail in raid 5 is a combination of annoyance and validation. it really sucks that you have to go and buy a new hard drive (when you just bought 3 of them, in april. at the same time, the knowledge that all your data is safe, just out of commision until you replace the drive, is nice. meanwhile over in the papasan...

3: Cassandra, the prophetess of Doom
cassie's nnot closing her mouth properly. it's almost closed, just slightly agape. a few hours later, her chin is noticably swollen. but she seems to be eating and drinking, so maybe she's just having an off day. like last weekend, when she was faking it, but we took her to the vet anyway.

so with all three balls in the air, and the apartment still not clean, we decide that going to a super bowl party is a pretty stupid idea, since neither of us like football really, and we haven't solved any of our problems. after a bit more moping, we headed off to Microcenter, where we bought the ram, the ibook, and the original hard drives (6 months no interest? OK!). we brought the ibook with, in case someone in the apple department could tell us what we were doing wrong. i browsed the hard drive section, and in accordance with Moore's Law, i couldn't find a matching 160 GB drive, but i did find an OEM 250 GB drive for $30 less. so i guess i'll just waste the 90 GB.
meanwhile, the sales person in the mac department verified that we bought the right RAM, and re-seated the stick of 512 with 'magic fingers' and it worked. apparently some of the forum posts i saw suggesting that sometimes ibooks just don't read newly installed memory on thee first boot were right. or it's that whole thing with 'being in the presense of a mechanic'. either way, happy it's fixed.

so we went home, and i set the RAID 5 array to rebuilding, and our roommate came home from a funeral on the east coast. we decided it was time to just chill the fuck out and order pizza (like the rest of america). turns out pizza hut is more than happy to omit cheese on their pizza. and the new pizza with the cheese bites on the crust is pretty awesome.

flashback to cassie right as we're going to bed, cassie finally starts mewing, and the wifest realizes that although she's been trying to eat, she's barely dented her food. and her chin has continued to swell, so that she is now jay-leno-kitty. boo. so we take her to the emergency vet, rather than making her wait until after work today. unfortunately, while she's not faking it, there doesn't seem to be any concrete reason why it's swollen. so some antibiotics, steroids, x-rays, and white blood cell counts later, we took her home. at least she got some more kitty gatorade injected.

P.S. kitties do not enjoy warm compresses. also, after starting the rebuilding at 7pm last night, i woke up just in time to catch windows finnally booting at 7am this morning. that's about as much time as it took to fill up my 60 GB drive from backup CD's two years ago, except with less button pushing on my part.