Electromagnetic Influences

Artemis has an iMac, it was coming up on 3 years old, and it had never been backed up. Worse, it was running Tiger, which does not have Time Machine, and it makes no sense to consider upgrading to Snow Leopard until she already has a backup. I decided to remedy the situation by sending her an external USB drive for her birthday. The drive arrived, the birthday passed, the holidays came, school started again, and the drive had still never been connected. Last week the opportune time came.

I had sent a drive which was twice the size of her internal disk, so I recommended partitioning it in two. I sent detailed instructions with images about how to use Finder and Disk Utility and Carbon Copy Cloner. I was certain that this would be a straightforward procedure, even for someone who didn't know the terms USB mass storage or disk partition.

Artemis proceeded, but she kept reporting that even when she unmounted the disk partitions the iMac kept warning her that she had not disconnected properly and might lose data. Then she reported one thing I could not have expected -- the Finder was showing something like a brain which vanished when she unplugged the USB cable. Worse, she reported that when she ejected the brain, it came back again.

I had bought her a drive from Western Digital, and that was enough to send me asking google what they knew. I found that others, including Mac owners had already been through this experience.

I managed to buy this drive during the first weeks of its availability, and it has a new feature -- a "Virtual CDROM" (VCD) which contains their backup software. The firmware in the drive presents it both as a USB mass storage device and as a CDROM. Within 6 weeks the vendor offered a patch for the firmware to disable the VCD. Perhaps if I visit Artemis I'll bother to do the firmware upgrade, but for now I've simply said to use the power switch on the drive after unmounting the disk partitions.

From the blogs above it's pretty clear what happened. Customers started bringing these drives back to the big box retailers with complaints that they did not act right. The big box retailers called the manufacturer and said "they're returning your drives, fix it". The manufacturer acted fast to do that.

It's not that the space consumed by the VCD is a big deal, for only one tenth of one percent of the capacity of the drive is being used for their software. It's the principle of creating a product which foists unwanted software upon the user. It's more than that.

By setting up the firmware such that Mac OS X repeatedly remounts the Virtual CDROM even when the user repeatedly ejects it the manufacturer created a little yapping dog. It's a little yapping dog that keeps coming back to hump your leg every time you kick it away.

Do you want to live forever?
 -- Valeria in Conan the Barbarian

Who wants to live forever?
 -- Queen, singing in Highlander

The wise immortal will tell nobody, as indicated by the experience of trees and clams.

One wonders ... at what point did this guy encounter Ellison's A Boy and His Dog?

My current casual shoes are a pair of sneakers which represent themselves as intended for skateboarding. I find this to be somewhat odd, for their laces are nearly frictionless. They routinely come untied. In general I have resorted to double-knotting them while morris dancing, but sometimes I dance before doing that. A couple of weeks ago one came untied during Bledington "William and Nancy", during the toeback capers, with feet far apart. I proceeded unhindered through the rounds, and then came the upright capers, with legs crossed. That was when I found myself standing on one of my laces just before the leap. That was when the fore and musician almost faltered as she giggled at me. She often has chided the dancers about laces -- usually it is the teens, not me, but this was not the first time for me, either.

In a previous instance I had told the fore that it seemed odd that skateboarding shoes might have loose laces. I said it seemed rather like Isadora Duncan and her fateful scarf trailing behind her. The fore responded that she had met the woman who gave that scarf to Isadora Duncan, for she was a friend of her mother.

This is only one of the treasures from morris dancing with this fore. Among her other experiences is catching frogs on the Carmel River with Ed Ricketts, Steinbeck's "Doc". She recalls being upset because she only had sneakers, while he was wearing hip waders.

So this Saturday I will happily head to Dickens Fair and dance, reinforcing the connections to what once was, and remembering that some of the past has been related to me personally by folks who were there.

I saw Jim Carrey's A Christmas Carol with the girls today. Colin Firth certainly does look young when he's computer generated. Lots of other fun 3-d conceits in there so as to pad the story to something like 3 times its natural run time.

But the story ...

Am I going to understand something more about what Dickens was saying, and about myself, every time I see a new dramatization?

But now I'm anticipating morris at Dickens Fair even more than before, and all the rest of the party at Fezziwig's.

Milk, it's got something for every body.
Choose the form.

Murdoch keeps complaining that Google is taking advantage of him, but he doesn't step out of the relationship.

This is not going to get resolved until everyone owns their own problems and decides that changing self is the effective avenue to changing the universe.

Those are the words of US 9th circuit judge Alex Kozinski from the 2002 decision regarding Aqua's hit single Barbie Girl.

Why here now? The girls were engaged in a contest about the lyrics of the song, and they wanted to know the authoritative words. Thanks to Wikipedia the whole story is available. There is more than one version -- the original to which Mattel objected and one of the most viewed videos on Youtube, and Mattel's own version on the Barbie website.

This ended up with me pondering in front of the girls about whether Mattel has negotiated the use of the tune and partial lyrics from Aqua, or whether they simply pay Aqua the ASCAP/BMI/whatever royalty every time somebody clicks the link on the Mattel web page.

Boeing can now toast cars from the air

Fortunately I really have no idea who are Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt, and I'm not going to care.