Knuckledragger

Old meme, still funny: Now officially a meme:

I should not find this as amusing as I do. In the middle- Nick Nolte, 1972.

I do believe this qualifies as elder cruelty. This is awesome.

The only non-Apple monitors that are better than Apple monitors cost more than Apple monitors. This cat belongs to Martin L Kennedy, the man behind All India Radio. According to last.fm, I have listend to more AIR tracks than anything else.

LIMBO pumpkin.

Ugh. Last night I shut down my 13" MBP and headed to the radio station. More observant HCers will note I didn't post in the broadcast thread. When I got to the station, the MBP would not boot up. I hit the power button, the screen lit up, the Apple logo appeared, the spinning "gear" showed up with a linear progress bar below it and 15 seconds later the machine powered down. As it turned out, I had a guest DJ (the first one in years) on my show and he was spinning an all vinyl set. I got him set up and spent the next hour in the station's production studio using the fax line to call Apple Care tech support. The tech walked me through a number of steps and we determined that the MBP's HDD was corrupted and not repairable. I scheduled a callback for this morning and the tech helped me format the drive and re-install OSX. I could probably have done this without the help of the tech, but since I paid for AppleCare, I'm damn well gonna use it. There was one major wrinkle: with 10.7 and 10.8 there is no install media, all installs are done through the $%&# Apple App Store. I couldn't remember my password (I've changed it several times recently and I've started using 1Pasword.) The end result was that I re-installed from the image on my Time Machine drive. I would have preferred to do a fresh 10.8 install and then copied my personal data over from the TM. All of this would only be a minor headache, buuut... as I have mentioned elsewhere, I'm Djing for 5 hours on Friday at RISE, the most exclusive club in Boston. I can NOT have my laptop fail during that gig. A friend of mine with a decade of OSX experience is suggesting I buy an external FW drive (like a LaCie 2.5" "ruggedized" model) and making it bootable. I'm considering that, but there's the added issue of Traktor (the DJ software I use) needing to be re-activated every time hardware changes, and it might object to being activated on both the int'l drive and the LaCie. I need a system I can rely on with as few complications as possible. Maybe I should take a cue from my vinyl-spinning friend.

Flashback from four years ago:

a