Aaron Adams’s Blowhard Blog

Larry “Bud” Melman has died at the age of 85. It really, sincerely does make me sad to see him go.

He was the spokesman for Toast on a Stick (prisoner-tested, no nutritional value). He brought Zachary Taylor’s last moments in front of a bowl of cherries to life for our historical edification. He offered strangers a hot towel. And he wore a Greek fisherman’s hat because it made him look good - damn good.

I was lucky enough to see a Letterman show in person which he was a part of. He was dressed as Batman, and said, “I’ve got your boy wonder right here in my pants.”

Thanks for the laughs, Larry.

The creator of the anti-Hillary pro-Obama Apple 1984 ad has been revealed.

Philip de Vellis, a strategist with Blue State Digital, acknowledged that he was the creator of the video…

Here’s the amusing part.

De Vellis said he used footage of an updated Apple ad that portrayed the female athlete wearing an iPod. He said he used standard Apple equipment to modify the video and edit Clinton’s image into the clip.
…
“Frankly, given what it looks like, we don’t have the technical capacity to create something like this,” he said. “It’s pretty extraordinary.”

Wow.

What a coincidence.

Computer Tech Accidentally Erases Info on Alaska’s $38 Billion Oil Fund

A computer technician at the Alaska Department of Revenue deleted applicant information for an oil-funded sales account — one of state residents’ biggest perks.

While reformatting the disk drive during a routine maintenance check, the technician mistakenly reformatted the backup drive as well and, suddenly, all the data disappeared.

A third line of defense — backup tapes that are updated nightly — were unreadable.

What was it I said in the last post?

If you don’t have at least two restorable copies of it, you don’t have it!

They had at least two copies, that’s good. Someone erased two of their three copies. The third copy was not restorable. Apparently they never bothered to test the tape backups to see that they actually worked. That’s just dumb, and maybe negligent.

Wow, I’m so fucking sick of this. Every ass munch who thinks he’s some kind of hot Mac jockey has some bullshit voodoo ritual he performs before, during, and after system updates, and the especially obsessive-compulsive ones run through a daily regimen of repairing permissions, deleting caches, updating prebindings, and ten other pointless things that make no difference from a day-to-day usage standpoint. If I were a developer, I’d write a daemon that continuously updated permissions, updated prebindings, and deleted caches every 5 minutes, sell it for $10, and retire next week. If paranoid idiots need to compulsively do these things, I might as well be rich because of it.

Read and remember this: There is no magic formula or ritual you need to follow to install updates. The steps for a clean, successful upgrade are very simple.

1. Get over your irrational system tweaking obsession. Just STOP! It’s not necessary. You don’t need to fix permissions constantly, only when you know for a fact that there is a permissions problem. You don’t need to update prebindings at every login. They’re updated when the OS needs to update them without your help. Stop deleting caches unless you know you have a specific problem with cached information.

Why do I have to point this out? It should be obvious to any thinking human being. The placebo effect of doing these stupid things is obviously very powerful, but 99.99999% of the time they accomplish nothing!

2. Don’t use “haxies” or other dumb software. They’re such a problem that Apple discards crash reports with “haxie” contents without even looking at them. Ding ding! That’s the fucking clue bell, people!

3. Install anacron. Anacron runs system maintenance scripts included with the OS and written and approved by Apple in the background at the appropriate time. Install anacron once and forget it. It’s all the system maintenance you need until a specific problem occurs.

4. Backup your irreproducible data every day. Wow! That’s damn important, and most people don’t do it. I think I’ll repeat it 3 more times.
Backup your irreproducible data every day.
Backup your irreproducible data every day.
Backup your irreproducible data every day.

If you don’t have at least two restorable copies of it, you don’t have it!
If you don’t have at least two restorable copies of it, you don’t have it!
If you don’t have at least two restorable copies of it, you don’t have it!

Backing up your data is the best way to protect yourself against any updating problems.
Backing up your data is the best way to protect yourself against any updating problems.
Backing up your data is the best way to protect yourself against any updating problems.

Screw all your tinkering with permissions and other pointless crap. Backup your damn data if you’re really serious about recovering from any problem, not just an update problem.

5. Run Software Update as normal and stop being paranoid. When the update comes up in SU, install it. Don’t wait a week. Don’t wait until you hear problem reports form others that are completely irreproducible on other machines. You have your data backed up, and you can recover from any problem, so you can confidently install any updates right away without worry. No amount of fiddling with prebinding will recover data, but a good backup will.

Really, installing updates isn’t bad, nor is it the traumatic ordeal so many people make it out to be. I’ve been installing updates for five years without a single problem because I keep my data backed up and stupid software off my machine. Get over your victim mentality. Instead of blaming bugs and engaging in superstition, take ownership of your damn data and responsibility for the health of your machine and proceed with confidence.

Saturday was warmer here, and the wind was blowing at a decent clip, so while I was at Target shopping for other things, I decided to get a kite. The amount of string that came with the kite wasn’t as much as I wanted, so I stopped one of the Target employees, who appeared to be about 20 years old, and asked, “Can you tell me where the kite string is?”

“You mean, like, string just for kites?”

Oh. My. God. This kid had never heard of kite string. That’s the Nintendo generation for you. On their ass in front of the TV or the computer since childhood, and never once flew a kite. What the hell.

And boy am I glad we had that daylight savings change. I think I saved so much energy today because I didn’t have to turn on my living room lamp for an hour that I may not get an electric bill this month. And it sure did feel a lot more like summer with the sun up longer… so much so, that children were outside playing in shorts and t-shirts today. Understand that today’s high was 55, and most of the day the temp was 40-something. The kids don’t care, and apparently neither do the negligent parents. Is it so awful to wear pants and a jacket? What’s with these idiots?