Saturday, March 14, 2009

Vans and Liars

Dear Honda,
your vans can never hope to live up to the greatness portrayed in your video. It says something about your product that you have to promote it by using images of success from competitors' products in a completely different market segment. It says something about you that you'd be willing to do it.

In reference to: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=myzwHDf3NhY

Monday, March 9, 2009

Twitter: the new RSS?

Is it just me, or is Twitter becoming the new RSS? I'm seeing a number of websites using it where it doesn't belong, essentially for RSS purposes - whenever there's an update on the site, they tweet. While that's kind of nice, I guess, because RSS never really caught on in the mainstream, you have to wonder if a centralized service like this is sustainable - after all, RSS is distributed. Also, I guess that points out some of the failings of RSS - namely that sites never promoted it as much as they could and it wasn't every made as easy as your general public would like.

Friday, March 6, 2009

Time Machine Miscalculation / Issues

So, although I do appreciate the many fine aspects of my Mac, there are nevertheless still some annoying things about it. Today I came across a particular problem affecting Time Machine. It seems that Time Machine, when initializing a new drive, requires at least 20% or so of additional free space. Makes sense. However, it doesn't require that later on - leading to weird behavior as described below.

So, OS X informed me that my drive was too small by like 900MB for the backup, and that I'd have to find a new drive for Time Machine. So, I deleted some files (more than 900MB), and tried to back up again. Still no dice. Figuring it was trying to do an incremental backup, I decided to wipe the drive so it would only have one snapshot on it. Doing that resulted in a serious issue - a drive that had started with more than 20% free space now only had like 5% or less (my backup and regular drive are the same size). So, long story short, I was now ever farther from ever getting Time Machine to play nice with my drive. I ended up having to move a bunch of files to an external disk, run Time Machine, then move them all back over after the new drive was initialized. That's a huge hassle, and I'm not sure what I would have done if I didn't have another drive I could put the files on in between.