The occasional musings of Andy Scheffler
It appears that, once again, my email domain is being used as the “From” line in a crapload of spam, because I’m getting a crapload of delivery errors and unknown logins. At least no one replies to it anymore chewing me out. (Or they do, and it gets caught by my own spamfilter.)
Spammers die die die if you have to resort to tricks then you aren’t selling anything worth buying.
I had been going really well for a long time. I have had no computer problems for months now. Then, in the span of 24 hours, I managed to kill two computers by not doing anything out of the ordinary. What’s amazing is that the two computers in question were both Macs.
I first hosed the karaoke machine (the “computer” which is just an external bootable hard drive, currently living on my G4 cube) by trying to use the command-line software upgrade, but then not finishing the process. At least I think that’s what caused it. The problem was that the Finder would keep starting up, then crashing, then starting up, then crashing. I had to reinstall the OS (in the wee hours of the morning, of course), but it seems to be working now.
Then the very next day, I was playing with my Powerbook, and I tried booting into OS 9. I got a flashing question mark disk icon, so I tried switching back, but it wouldn’t let me. I tried booting to my hardware test disk, but it couldn’t mount the drive. The next morning, I called Apple tech support, and in the process ended up using the Disk Utilities that come on the 10.3 install disk, which did find the disk and enabled me to switch the startup disk back. What frightens me about this is that there is now the possibility for putting my laptop into a state where it can’t be fixed if I don’t have a specific CD with me.