Posts Tagged ‘Mac OS X Leopard’

OOh! It works!

Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008

I’m finally back in the office, my back is feeling up to sitting in this god awful chair. I’m playing around with Leopard, and Parallels Desktop because Sean was lucky enough to figure out what was going wrong with the routes we were taking. It required a lot of Linux editing and that’s not really in my field of expertise. He figured it out, the whole computer acted up for a little while and then he figured out how to fix that. Now everything seems to be running pretty smoothly. The major draw-back was my lack of ability to access my external hard drive. It turns on and the red light informs me that it’s “running” but then when it changes back to blue it doesn’t show the drive on either Leopard or XP and then if it does begin to view it on XP it says that I don’t have the proper permissions to get into the drive. With a major thanks to Jackie (my Mac guru) I was able to fix everything and now everything is up and running just fine.

On another bright note, Sean and I are going on vacation at the end of the month. We set a few financial goals for ourselves and if we can accomplish them by the 23rd then we’re going to keep our reservations for Harrah’s at the end of the month. If we’re unable to reach the goal then we’ll cancel the reservation and hang on until next month. The actual drive up there is the only thing that’s really going to cost us any money, it’s the cost of gas and a few tolls to pay. It’s still cheaper than taking the Ferry because even with the $37 Ferry ride we’re going to have to drive North for about an hour or so. It’s easier just to put gas in the car and get the hell out of here. The room itself is complimentary, and we’re lucky enough to have the new luxury suite available for two nights – absolutely free. Brand new hardwood floors, jacuzzi tubs and plasma TV’s – it’ll be a nice little get-away. After that there’s the pool to hang out in, no children permitted (they have to go to the teen pool) so I figure since we’re going mid-week there’s really going to be no one there so it’ll be possible to lay down and relax without dealing with screaming children or unruly drunks for that matter. I also have about $300 in cash that I can print out at the Kiosk and then of course there’s the food comps so we’re really not spending any of our personal money at all. Of course we’re going to want to Gamble but with all of the amenities that are available – I doubt I’ll be on the Casino floor very often. We need to get away to clear our heads, no dogs, no parents, just us. It’ll be pretty nice.

Jobs and Upgrades

Friday, March 28th, 2008

It’s been a pretty hectic week.  I’m still waiting on word from my Interview last Friday.  I called on Monday and was told that they’re still conducting interviews so I should try back in a few days, I just called back about 20 minutes ago and they’re still doing interviews.  I’m a very patient person so maybe if I just wait it out maybe something good will come of it.

Sunday went well, dinner turned out OK.  By Monday evening Karen’s sister had come back from her Easter trip to Atlantic City.  Minus getting lost in the casino, and having her two younger kids with her bothering just about everyone, she did at least enjoy herself.  Her and Karen are going back up there on the 3rd, just an overnight.  Sean and I would also like to go this month because I have the entire month comped but I’m not going to stress about it.  My father is supposedly going up at the end of the month when he’s done with radiation theropy, I’d like to meet up with him but I’m going up to NY in June for his 60th birthday anyway – I don’t know if I’ll be able to make those two trips with the way finances are looking right now.

The rest of the week I’ve just been putting in resumes, contacting a few leads and then going from there.  I did spend a lot of time with the Mac in the last few days.  On Monday Sean asked me if I had any kind of attachment to the keyboard that came with my iMac, I personally prefer using everything that comes standard but that’s based completely on my being anal retentive about organization and matchy-matchy things.  However, I also know he uses the Mac quite a bit now that he’s working on Flash related things so for his comfort I went to hook up my old Logitech Multimedia Keyboard.  It hasn’t been touched in about six months so it was looking pretty disgusting.  So I decided to pop out the screws, pop off all of the keys and then clean it.  I had a whole system going, all of the keys were soaking in warm water to melt off any of the caked-on dirt.  It was primarily lotion and then on top of that it was dust so they just didn’t look good.  Upon taking off the face-plate I saw more dust and grime than I’d ever had in any keyboard before – that’s what I get for leaving it under the desk for so long.  So I took about two hours to clean it out, during that process (where it now looks brand new) I upgraded from Tiger to Leopard.  The iMac came with Tiger but it had the upgrade DVD so I made it a point to process that.

My goal after I completed the upgrade was to install Parallels Desktop 3 so I can also run Windows on it.  I didn’t get that accomplished until yesterday, I was having a lot of trouble getting it moving because there’s a hack that you have to run in order for it to properly work on Leopard that they haven’t worked into the program yet.  So I gave up and Sean went ahead and did it for me when things finally worked the way they were supposed to.  I thought he crashed the Mac at some point considering it kept booting in excess for about an hour.  I wound up falling asleep in the bedroom for a few hours, well the whole night really.  He managed to get everything in working order, including the installation of Windows XP.  I then slept the rest of the night and as of 7am, I’ve been wide awake.

I haven’t gotten in there to play around yet, I’m on the laptop in the living room at the moment.  My back isn’t feeling to great so sitting in that god awful chair just isn’t a possibility at this point in time.  I’ll go in there later after I’ve had some time to stretch it out, there are quite a few programs that I’m looking to get back and you can only use them on Windows, hence the dual setup.  The thing I like about this one is the fact that it’s not a dual-boot option, I can run Windows inside of OS X by just having it boot to it’s own little window.  So basically I’m using a browser with Windows inside of it, I like that idea.  In the future I’ll install Vista, I have the serial from the other desktop in the house, I do like the fact that I can have many instances of the Parallel setup so I can run as many different operating systems as the Mac will handle.  I’m going to stop at Vista though, I see no point in running anything else.  I’m even considering setting up a second monitor so I can run Windows on one side and Mac on the other, I think that’ll work out pretty well for me.

For now I’ve got a few emails to send out and a few leads to check on.  Guess I should get my ass in gear.