After three weeks or so I was able to look into it again and decided that a firmware update must have hosed the logic board on the Mini, thus causing the fan to run on high. I did try several apps for measuring/controlling fan speed but all of them reported either no fan installed or the fan running at 0 RPM — not good! I also tried resetting the EFI but that didn’t fix it either. Long story short (actually this is getting pretty long), I set up appointment at the local Genius Bar. Unfortunately for me, I got tied up at work that day and was unable to make the appointment. Thankfully for me though, a good friend of mine works at Apple and happened to see my name on the appointment list that day. He called me and asked me about the problems and I explained all of them. The following Sunday I saw him at church and he told me he’d gladly take the machine in for me. Then he said, he had one discount left for the year (Apple employees get a number of various discounts on purchases) and he would be glad to let me use it – in fact, he was upset that I hadn’t asked him in the first place!  Furthermore, he offered to get the Mini returned (this was about 33 days after I’d purchased it)! I spent the service debating the matter and finally decided I couldn’t wait any longer or get by with another Mini. The discount opportunity (and stress I’d been through until now) were too much to ignore and I decided to go ahead and pull the trigger. A few days later, my friend called me and was able to get it all finalized — now I’m waiting for a brand new, 2010 Mac Pro to arrive at my door! I’m all set to load it up with RAM and the SSD I already had purchased last month. I did get the 2.8GHz model but as these chips are dropping in price (and about to be replaced by the E5s), I hope to at some point upgrade to a 3.33 6-core model for several hundred dollars (the 3.33 GHz version from Apple would have added $1200 to my price).

I’m excited!  While this won’t be a 2012 Machine like I’d been waiting so long for, it should easily last me (with the kind of work I’ll be doing on it) 4-5 years and possibly even longer than that, and for that, I’m grateful!

Yesterday morning (Sunday) I had a nightmare scenario take place at church. We were scheduled to have a guest speaker (organization will remain nameless) speak to the congregation during the service in place of the sermon. Twenty minutes prior to the service I am in my office and the phone rings. I pick it up and it’s the guest speaker calling to say 1) she’s lost and can’t find the building and 2) asking whether I’m the tech guy and that she has a few videos she needs to show for her message. My stomach drops and I instantly remember how I’d truly considered staying in bed all day (have been dealing with a cold/laryngitis all week).

Ten minutes later she arrives (so now it’s about ten-til) and I’m handed a file folder full of DVDs and a manuscript with videos highlighted. Luckily for me, she wants three videos shown consecutively during one part and then two other videos shown consecutively a little later (so picture this, going through the menus on DVD discs trying to show one video after another while the whole congregation watches). My stomach takes a nosedive and I do a combination in my head between praying and swearing, unable to believe I’m supposed to make this work on ridiculously short-notice! I start thinking about what I can possibly do (remembering I am having serious issues with my main computer in my office and Windows has stopped recognizing all DVD drives) and suddenly it hits me, “try handbrake”. Handbrake is a nifty little program that rips DVDs. Most people use it for making copies of their purchased DVDs/Blu-Ray discs to play on a computer (or steal from Netflix) but I use it to occasionally rip conference DVDs for clients with it (a church might have a conference and send me ten DVDs from it that they want put on their website ASAP). The issue I have is I’m using ProPresenter on a four year old Mac laptop and I need the files to be properly optimized. I run to my office and go to the server remembering I have Handbrake installed there. I put a DVD in and am able to tell Handbrake I need a certain chapter and I see that it will rip to a M4V file – fantastic, that is a filetype compatible with ProPresenter and if the file isn’t too large, my computer should be able to handle it! I rip one and throw it on a thumb drive – take it upstairs and try it – BOOM! It works!

I quickly start ripping the rest and then discover one is not recognized — shoot, a bad disk! Unfortunately it’s after 10am now and the service has started — I run to the sanctuary and start running ProPresenter for the first couple songs – I know if I can get those first few songs done there’s a kid in the room who can run the rest, I just don’t want to leave the hard (and new) songs to him to manage. As I’m doing this, a lady in the congregation walks in and comes over to me – she hands me a CD and says, “I’m supposed to sing today, can you play track 4?” I take it (thinking, “why didn’t I get this earlier?”) and throw it in the CD player. Something tells me to check the output on the CD player — I look in the back and the audio cable is missing! I start digging around (in between song slide changes) and can’t find it anywhere. As sooon as the second song is done, I grab the kid and tell him to operate the comptuer – I grabbed a screwdriver and start taking apart the rack to get to where the audio input is for the CD player (converter box). I find it and discover there are no RCA jacks plugged in – Drat, I must’ve taken the CD player out and never returned them! I run to my office again, find a cord long enough and get the player plugged in. That frees me up to keep working on the DVD problem…

I proceed to run around the building trying the non-functioning DVD in multiple computers and DVD players trying to determine if the disk indeed is bad beyond salvage or not. Unable to get it working, I happen to mention the problem to my other tech guy and he offers to try it on his laptop — he puts it in his four year old Dell and the video starts playing (this is very odd, must be a pretty decent DVD reader in that laptop). Anyway, he cues it up and is able to play it with Windows Media Player. I get the rest of the videos (this is still happening during worship/announcements mind you) and am able to get it all set (crossing fingers and praying).

SOMEHOW, by the time the special musical number comes on everything seems to be set. And indeed, by the incomprehensible grace of God everything worked pretty well. I did manage to accidentally start the CD on track 1 but I had selected “4″ on the remote so that’s a separate issue. The videos all worked flawlessly during the sermon too! In fact, it went so well the rest of the family hardly believed me when they asked why I’d looked so stressed out all morning – they said it was seamless (expect for the missed CD track of course).

This is a really long post and I feel like I’m rambling but I really just wanted to express these thoughts and thank God for his help. It was really a stressful morning and I was completely exhausted by the end of the service, but at the end of it all, the service went on and the message was conveyed. Mission accomplished, thanks, Lord!

I need a new computer in the worst kind of way — dying to get a new Mac Pro but Intel just doesn’t seem to want to let Apple get those chips!  It’s really getting frustrating as I’ve been feebly trying to limp along with a 5-year old machine and it’s just not running very well.  Anyone from Intel reading this, please tell the guys working on these things that I’m REALLY ANXIOUS!  Thanks

Since January or so I’ve been chomping at the bit to buy a new computer.  This time, a Mac, as I’m done with the endless issues with Windows, as well as the fact that most of my critical work is in programs that work just as well (if not better than) on OS X.  The holdup?  I’ve written about it before, but my hesitation is the fact that the current Mac Pros are all limited to SATA II, and the latest hard drives are faster than that.  I simply can’t go spending $3000 on a computer that is that behind-the-times on a critical speed area.  I get that Apple is waiting for the right generation of Intel chips to be released, and that’s great, but I don’t understand why they didn’t put SATA III on a year ago.  As of last week, all other Mac machines have Sata III and Thunderbolt (which isn’t as essential IMHO, although I’d get it if given the option), while the most expensive machine (that’s several hundreds of dollars more expensive than any Windows competitors) is so antiquated.

I’m tempted to just buy a completely tricked out Mac Mini except for the fact that the RAM is limited to 8gb.  My problems with the iMacs are Ram limitation (can do 32gb but it’ll cost $3000), access to hard drives (need SSD drives and don’t want to have to take the entire screen apart to get to them), the glossy screen (CAN’T STAND GLOSSY SCREENS), and the heat problems that plague iMacs (tendency to burn up after 4 years or so and the top of the computer is always hot-to-the-touch, even in the store).  That said, if they had a matte screen option, I’d likely go for it.  Thing is, all things considered, I don’t really need all of the power in a Mac Pro, but in every other area it’s much more ideal for my needs.

I’ve also contemplated getting a fully-loaded Macbook Pro, but the fact is, I can’t stand using laptop screens — they’re too small.  My current desk setup has two 22″ LCD monitors with a 19″ LCD mounted above them.  I can’t go from that to a 17″ laptop (and 17″ is too big and hot to carry around anyway).  I’m really hoping that Apple is able to get some new machines out by September — although most experts are saying February 2012.

When it comes to Apple products, sadly, they have been behind-the-times in terms of SATA 3.0.  All of their products still use SATA 2.0 with the exception of the brand new Macbook Pro, which has one SATA 3.0 port on it for the hard drive.  Great news, Apple seems to finally be coming around!  Well, it would be great news except that as of this moment, for some reason that port is not working properly with the new Intel SATA 3.0 SSD drives.  Mac Performance Guide just got one of the new Intel SSD drives (for $650!) and went to test it in the new MBP — it wouldn’t even be recognized!  This blog post from last night indicates that the drive would not work AT ALL.

I have been watching this news closely because I’m hoping to buy some kind of Mac product this year and really want it to have SATA 3.0 on it.  I’m hoping Apple gets their act together quickly (the Mac Pros really should have had SATA 3.0 a year ago).

Sources:
WIKI
SerialATA.org

I haven’t always been the best at backing things up.  I’ve always done it, but I haven’t always been consistent about doing it.  While I’ve never lost anything really important because of a disk crash, I’ve certainly come very lose.  I’m a big fan of off-site backup, and in fact, I do backup all my important files with Carbonite.  When it comes to general stuff though, backing up isn’t always convenient.  While I could backup everything on my hard drive to Carbonite, I choose not too because of the huge amounts of bandwidth it would take to do so — if I tried to recover a music library from an online backup site it would take DAYS!  This is where Karen’s comes in.  I have Karen’s running and set to simply make an exact copy of My Documents (or in the case of Windows 7, Documents, Music, Video, etc) onto a second hard drive every night.  While this does tend to build up lots of extra data over time (like files you’ve deleted and such), it’s also a complete, easy-to-access, full backup that I don’t have to worry about.  Ideally I would also be making a full backup on an external drive that I store off-site, but honestly, I’m not too worried about it as I do use Carbonite for the *Mission Critical* data.

Note that I am running this on Windows 7 Pro 64bit (more than one machine) without any problem.  There you have it, backup, backup, backup, backup!

Until last week!  Last weekend news broke that several thousand people logged in and discovered their inboxes completely wiped out.  Gone.  Empty.  Nothing left!  I immediately realized that I’d never even thought to back up my Gmail account because well, frankly, I assumed Google would take care of that.  So, I started looking around for ways to back it up.

There are two ways to go about this – getting a mail program (like Outlook or Thunderbird) and setting up a POP3 account that will then download all the mail into.  This is a fine option, except that you’ll end up with one more program running on your machine that hogs resources.  At the same time though, you could easily open a mail program once a week or so, let it download anything new, and then close it – that would work.

The other option (and the one I settled on for now) is to use a program like Gmail Backup.

Last week, we had a major snowstorm and got about 2 feet of snow in 8 hours — the county literally declared a snow emergency and ordered everyone off the roads expect for emergency vehicles.  Unbeknown  to us, our snowplow service had performed their duties and was dutifully plowing out the church parking lot all night — this was all well and good except for the fact that our ultra high-efficiency boilers have exhaust vents 3′ off the parking lot and the plow completely covered them with a huge mound of snow.  Because the exhaust vents were covered up, the boilers automatically shut down to protect themselves from damage.  It was only because we were snowed-in and unable to leave our house all day, that we randomly logged in and checked the temperatures at church and discovered the sanctuary close to 50 degrees (meaning the gymnasium was probably even lower and could soon have pipes freezing).  We were able to call a church member, who lives a block away from the church, and have him clean out the exhaust pipes and check everything — as soon as he did, the boilers both fired up and went back to normal.
As a result of that incident, I went through and set up all the alerts for notifying us whenever there’s a problem.  I had done that initially during installation but somewhere along the line turned it off during configuration (probably to avoid getting bombarded with 1000 emails).  Now the thermostats will email AND text message me whenever the temperature drops below 55 degrees anywhere in the building.  Lucky for me (sarcasm!), it happened this morning at 3am.  When I woke up at 5am for work, I immediately saw the text messages on my phone and pulled up the monitoring website to discover once again, temperatures were getting very low (it’s 14 degrees outside, and the temperature is supposed to drop to ZERO today).  I got my act together and got over to church as soon as I could.  The exhaust vents were clear but both boilers were shut down with some kind of thermostat error.  I was able to manually reset them, check the pipes everywhere to make sure they were getting heat, and save the day!  There again, if we didn’t have the Proliphix units controlling our temperatures, we would have had NO idea, for potentially a day or two, that there was a serious problem.  Yes, we will have to do further research to figure out what made the boilers both shut down (there’s a problem somewhere) but at least we can know soon after they do go down, long before anything is able to freeze.

You might be thinking, “I’d really like to get some of those thermostats but they’re just so expensive.”  I can understand that, but let me just say, ours have paid for themselves this winter — we likely would have had a burst pipe last week had it not been for these things — and that would have cost us a LOT more money and frustration!

Thank you, Proliphix IMT 350c/w and Uniphy Remote Management!!!!

LINK

SO, I decided to switch, and so far, it's running great!  I need to deal with some search engine and spam plugins still, but within a day or two everything should be up and running normally.  I'm also working on a different design - since the old one was temporary anyway and needs something more permanent and professional.

That's all for now!