Category: musings

Hawaii was lots of fun, but now I’m back in smokey california doing my best to avoid doing too much work.

I used to stream along. I think I secretly, or maybe not secretly, wanted other people to stream with me. I thought about how cool that would be if other people would catch my vibe and want it enough to seek it out.

I think now I probably have lost that wild naive edge I used to have. I probably have moved along to some other not quite so wild and not quite so naive and not quite so edgey egde. Haha, I wouldn’t have it any other way, though. Well… not most of the time, anyway.

Vida and I returned from our week or so at Burning Man this past Monday evening. I’m starting to acclimate back into the normal swing of things again. I have some observations about my experiences, but I’m not quite ready to share them yet.

Maybe later.

I’m leaving for 8 days in Hawaii tomorrow morning. I suspect the lure of my website will be weakened by the force of the tropical paradise so don’t expect much in the way of updates.

I grew up as an air force kid (air force brat in some circles) and that meant my whole family moved every 3 or 4 years pretty much my entire life. My whole family consisted of my Mom, my Dad, and me. There were other relatives around in some of the places we were, and there were always family friends and what-not, but it was essentially just the three of us. The situation gave me the power to change how I represented myself each time I changed schools. If I was tired of being the dorky kid with the striped collared shirts, I could become the dorky kid with the leather jacket and long hair, haha. But really, I somehow realized somewhere in the back of my mind that when meeting new people you would basically be perceived however you represented yourself. If you dressed dorky, you were dorky… if you dressed like a Load (or Hessian or Metalhead or whatever your town called it) you were a Load.

That was great when I entered high school, because no one knew me so I was taken at face value. Eventually people realized I was still a dork at heart, but I got my foot in the proverbial door first. Now, however, I’ve noticed that I have trouble with people figuring out too much about me. I want to maintain some sort of hiding places in my character that I can retreat into when I feel threatened or uncertain. Haha, but now you know too much.

I don’t know what I did, but my powerbook is not playing nice today. It seems to have started with the new 10.2.8 update, but I think it might be a problem with the drive. My pbs (pasteboard server) keeps crashing, making it so I can’t copy and paste. Agh! I can’t live without copying and pasting. I’m still fiddling with it right now. Hopefully it won’t take too long to fix.

In case anyone else has this same problem, I thought I would post my solution here. There seems to be a lack of real problem/solution pairs for Mac OS X out there.

The Problem:

After upgrading to OS X 10.2.8, I noticed that I couldn’t seem to drag RSS news feeds in NetNewsWire into folders to group them. I first thought it was a bug in NetNewsWire so I decided to upgrade to the newer version. While navigating my way to the upgrade in Safari, I noticed that I couldn’t copy and paste URL’s either. On top of that, dragging messages in Mail was goofy, too. It was a system-wide problem! I thought it must be the dumb 10.2.8 update. Since the first version of the update had been pulled for bugs, it seemed likely. However, I tried reinstalling 10.2 from scratch and the problem didn’t go away. Hmm. In the Console, I noticed messages like this:

Oct 5 12:05:35 delilah crashdump: Crash report written to: /Users/me/
Library/Logs/CrashReporter/pbs.crash.log

as well as…

Oct 5 13:04:44 delilah crashdump: Crash report written to: /Library/
Logs/CrashReporter/lsregister.crash.log

There were more lines about bad xml in a preferences file (Info.plist) and it was reverting to the 10.1 method of reading it and all that. I’d seen those errors before and they didn’t seem to matter. It turns out they were important this time. Upon further investigation, I found out that ‘pbs’, the process that was crashing, is the pasteboard server and is responsible for handling copy/paste actions as well as some drag and drop. Aha! I still don’t know exactly what lsregister is, but it was fixed by this solution as well.

The Solution:

This took me way too long to figure out, but it was some bad XML somewhere that was causing it to crash. I’m not sure why it was even messing with the file that was ‘bad’, but deleting the file mentioned in the error logs fixed it. Note that I also repaired my disk using DiskWarrior and it had some relatively serious problems. Those problems were probably responsible for the goofy behavior in the first place.

I’m happy to report that my powerbook is working well once again… And if I hadn’t reinstalled the OS, it would be back to normal now. As it is, I have to reinstall a few things that stopped working afterwards. Most things still work though, so it’s not too bad.

I hope this information helps someone else at some point.

We basically screwed up at work today and there was a whole fiasco. It happens from time to time and it always sucks when it does. On days like this I just have to remind myself that no one’s lives are at stake and no matter how bad we screw up, life goes on. Some people get mad over things like this, but I tend to think that’s mostly people that have someone else getting mad at them over it. Well that, and some people are just crazy and get mad over every little thing. I still get mad or frustrated or annoyed for no good reason sometimes, but I try hard to not let things get to me too much. Stress is a killer.

Vida’s doing much better now in case you were worried. She’ll be on crutches for the next month or so still, but the worst of it is over. She’s still complaining about being on the couch all the time, but Days of Our Lives is keeping her company.

Vida had surgery on her ankle on Wednesday afternoon and I’ve been nursing her since then. She’s been in a great deal of pain even with the extra-powerful pain pills she’s been taking every 4 hours. She’s also been having trouble keeping down food of pretty much any kind.

I’ve been finding it very difficult to watch her in such pain. It’s making me be uncharacteristically emotional. She’s being the strong one. I’ve been doing what I can to make sure she has what she needs to be as comfortable as possible. I’ve been on vacation for the past 2 days so I could do that, but I’m going to be working tomorrow so we’ll see how that goes.

She was in pain pretty much constantly for 4 months before this surgery, so it is a good thing overall. Once she’s all healed up, she’ll be back to normal. It’s only been a day and a half so far and I’m assuming it’s going to get easier. I hope so, anyway. phew!