Windows Phone 7 Series: Everything Is Different Now - Windows phone 7 - Gizmodo

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Hanging around

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Humor FAIL

It's hilarious listening to kids as they explore humor. Here are a few decidedly not funny jokes the kids told tonight.

Knock knock
Cameron: Knock knock.
Colin: Who's there?
Cameron: Come on in, I'm going to put a diaper on you.

A joke about a duck
Cameron: Why did the duck take the train?
Katye: Because he left his car in a parking lot.
Colin: Because he couldn't reach the gas pedals.
Cameron: No, because he was cranky!

Merry Christmas 2009!

Greetings of peace & joy to all. And a special warm welcome to visitors who received our Christmas photo card and felt duty bound to visit our blog. Welcome, and thanks for dropping by.

(To see more pics from Christmas Sunday service, including some in-focus ones where I am not wondering, "gee, I wonder what will happen if I twist this thingy on my camera", click here.)

We started blogging in October 2004 (see an amusing picture of how teeny the two kids looked back then). At the time, I thought of the blog a time as a replacement for the Christmas letter with the added benefit of more authentic and frequent updates. While there is joy -- and value -- in looking back at an entire year of work and school and life, it's also tempting if you're only doing it once a year to adopt the self-congratulatory tone of an alumni magazine. With a blog, you can be self-congratulatory every day of the week. :-)

So here we are, 795 posts later. We must confess, though, that our rate of blog posts slowed dramatically, as 2009 became for us (like for the rest of the world), the year of micro-updates delivered via Facebook status updates (see Frank's and Fedora's) and Twitter tweets (see Frank's stream @withfries2 and Fedora's stream @flchen1).

Still, this is the appropriate outlet for paragraph- and Christmas-letter sized thoughts (as opposed to the sentence- and 140-character sized updates), so here we go with the year-in-review for the Chen clan:

• Frank started a new job with Andreessen Horowitz, a startup venture capital company based in Menlo Park.
• The cozy intimacy of a 10-person firm -- especially since this is Frank's third time out with co-founders Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz (#1: Netscape, #2: Loudcloud/Opsware) -- is a welcome contrast from the lumbering anonymity of tech behemoth HP.
• He is learning a ton (which he loves) and feeds on the energy that naturally bubbles out of tech entrepreneurs.
• A few days each week (weather permitting), he's doing the 26-mile round trip commute to work on his mighty steed, the Giant Twist Freedom DX electric assist bike. To date, he's logged over 1,000 miles, 1,160 pounds of offset CO2, 110,000 calories, and 1 near accident. Since this is a Christmas letter, he will avoid a salty dress down of drivers who don't share the road and simply say, "blessed are the bike riders, for they shall inherit the road." :-)
• This is also Frank's first full year on the Fellowship Bible Church board, where he is introducing useful bits of the business world (e.g., setting objectives, aligning our spending behind those goals, and adopting best practices) to the church. (You may quietly hum "Sit Down You're Rocking the Boat" to yourself as you read.)
• In typical Silicon Valley geek fashion, he wonders idly whether this is the year to learn how to play Settlers of Catan (rather than golf).
  
  
• Fedora is shaking her head at her own foolishness in thinking that with all the kids in school (for at least part of each day), she'd have more free time this year. She volunteers at their schools and contrary to any rumors, does actually leave school grounds during the day. And no, she's not secretly running a business using school resources. The days zip by in a blur of kid herding and avoiding household chores.
  
  
• Colin ("serious young man") is halfway through 4th grade, and in an abrupt shift of metaphors, is rounding 3rd base and windmilling hard for home on his elementary school education. How is that even possible?
• His teachers tell us he's doing well, though remains somewhat reserved in class (a carbon copy of both his parents).
• Outside of school, he enjoys video games, drawing, origami, watching TV, and collecting Pokemon cards. (His parents are thinking "professional video game player" or "professional video game designer" might be good career trajectories.)
  
  
• Katye ("look out, here I come") is a 1st grader, and her teacher is a Huge Fan. It helps that she'll likely pass the 5th grade reading level by year-end, good news for the school's median test scores.
• Her teacher one day declared, "if I could pay her to come to my class, I would" on account of her energy level, eagerness to participate, and willingess to play with anyone.
• Her self-proclaimed hobbies: watching Pokemon on TV, playing with her animal friends (but still no dolls), playing Webkinz, drawing, writing stories, and above all reading.
  
  
• Cameron ("think twice if you think I'm getting left behind") just started a half-day pre-kindergarten at Gloria Dei (as his sister did before him).
• This makes mornings a little challenging, as two caravans must leave the house and arrive at their destinations by 8 and 8:15 am. Luckily, Frank can usually trot him over before going to work.
• He just started getting into video games this year, and his favorites are Lego Star Wars, Lego Indiana Jones, and Wii Sports Resort. As I am writing this post, he has just completed the Forest (level 5) Showdown on Wii Sports Resort. So now he has gotten as far his daddy (Colin is, of course, way past this level.)
• Mom and dad are proud that at the annual children's Christmas service program at the school, he managed to remember his lines, hand gestures, and music -- or at least, close enough for pre-K purposes.
  

We wish you and your family a peaceful, joyful, and love-filled holiday season. Come by and visit, either electronically or physically. We'd love to see you either way.

Christmas Letter Goes Here

Hi, everyone! Here is where our little Christmas update is going to go once we write it. Rest assured, it won't be filled with news of our incredibly brilliantly accomplished children or photos of our immaculately clean home or cute stories of our world travels. But perhaps you'll feel caught up and mildly entertained anyway! Here's hoping ;)

Oh, and if you have a few minutes while you're waiting for the good stuff, consider backing up your computer. See recent posts below for some how-tos and whys...

(Just FYI, this is Fedora, who rarely contributes content--if you're not feeling sufficiently amused, apologies, and please check back, when our real update is posted by our actual blogger.)

iMac Repair Post #2 -- the Backup Regimen

We're taking a brief break from the chronicle of how our iMac got its new hard drive to describe our backup regimen. Here's what I want my backup strategy to accomplish:

• Survive the failure of any single hard drive.
• Be able to restore all our documents, especially media files (music, photos, videos).
• I'm not interested in restoring my system files, as I prefer to re-install the operating system over restoring a whole system backup. This recovery takes more time but results in (even on a Mac, and especially true on a Windows machine) leaner, speedier, and more stable machine.

The Main Ingredients
The two main ingredients to our backup strategy are Mac OS X's built-in Time Machine feature and a HP MediaSmart EX 485. But alas, as simple as Time Machine is, backup is a little more complicated than just hooking the two up and turning Time Machine on -- mostly because we also have to take into consideration how our media applications (primarily iTunes, iPhoto, but include a host of other less commonly used applications for accessing our music, photos and video) need to use the files.

For all our documents except for our media files -- music, photos, and videos -- it is actually just plug and play. The HP MediaSmart comes with software that makes it look like a Time Machine disk. To set this up:

• Plug the iMac and the MediaSmart into the same switch (in our case, a Linksys WRT54G)
• Install the HP MediaSmart software on the Mac
• Login to the HP MediaSmart Server Control Panel using the MediaSmart's admin username/password (same credentials you use to manage the server itself)
  
• Decide how much space you want to set aside for Time Machine backup (we're using 500GB).

Once you've down this, fire up Time Machine and select the 500GB disk named "Backup to HP MediaSmart Server" as your Time Machine backup disk.

Note: I've heard plenty of horror stories from folks trying to use generic SMB volumes for Time Machine backups. Do so at your own peril, and read up on best practices before you go down that treacherous path.

In the Time Machine Options... window, I've chosen a few directories not to backup:

• The Backup to HP MediaSmart Server disk itself
• The external hard drive containing my virtual machines and photos -- more on this later
• System Files and Applications

Time Machine then goes to work, automatically and continuously backing up all our documents, applications, application settings, and local mail directories.

For our media files, here's what we do:

Music files live on the HP MediaSmart server, managed by iTunes.

• I let iTunes manage the contents of the directory, so there's a folder called iTunes inside the Music directory, and iTunes is mostly ok with pointing to that directory -- provided you make that volume available automatically when you login. Use System Preferences | Accounts to make that happen.
• I let the HP MediaSmart automatically backup the contents of the Music folder to multiple hard drives automatically.
• Finally, I sync the entire contents of my Music library to my 80GB hard-drive based iPod once in a while.
• This means our music library lives on at least 3 hard drives: two inside the HP MediaSmart server, and one in the iPod.
• Since the audio files live on the HP MediaSmart server, most any client can access the music -- our Tivo, other PCs and Macs (via iTunes or Windows Media Player), my iPhone (via HP's iPhone app), and authorized folks on the Web (via HP's Flash-based streaming app).

Photos and videos live on an external hard drive, managed mostly by iPhoto, and which I manually sync to the HP MediaSmart

• I have a Photos directory on an external Firewire 800 hard drive.
• The iPhoto library lives on this external drive.
• We currently have >250GB of photos and videos.
• We use an external drive for performance reasons. iTunes is ok with files living on a slow-to-access network drive, but I doubt iPhoto and iMovie would be ok.
• After loading new photos with iPhoto, I sync the files to my HP MediaSmart from the Terminal:

rsync -avnr --progress /Volumes/MyExternalDisk/Photos/iPhoto\ Library/ /Volumes/Photos/iPhoto\ Library/

• In the above -- MyExternalDisk is the name of my external drive; Photos is the name of the folder the HP MediaSmart exports to the iMac.
• As with Music files, I let the HP MediaSmart duplicate all photos in this directory to multiple internal hard drives.
• So our photos are also on 3 hard drives: the external drive connected to the iMac and 2 drives inside the HP MediaSmart server.
• In addition to this backup, I usually upload photos to Smugmug, where we have an unlimited account which lets us upload anything we want. But we didn't start using Smugmug until about 2.5 years ago, so the archive there is incomplete.

I'm told the new HP MediaSmart servers will do a better job of automatically scooping up media files, even when they live on a Mac. Hopefully folks like me who own the EX485 will get that improved media syncing next year.

Next up: because we don't backup our system files, restoring the OS and applications requires a bit of manual work which I'll describe in the next post. Is it worth the manual tweaking? I think so.

Even on a Mac, systems accumulate crud over time, and a fresh install gets your system back to its factory-fresh -- read: speedy -- state. A factory fresh install of Snow Leopard feels snappier than one that started as 10.4.x and eventually made its way to 10.6.x. This is of course even more true for Windows machines, which I'll routinely rebuild every 6-12 months as a matter of system maintenance completely independent of backup needs. We'll see if Windows 7 makes this unnecessary, but, as one of the new Mac ads point out, this seems unlikely:

iMac repair post #1

As promised, here is my first in a series of posts about our experience getting our beloved iMac fixed. We got our iMac in April 2008 off Craigslist from someone who was planning to get a Macbook instead. She originally bought it in the fall of 2007 and had bought an AppleCare extended warranty on it. Boy, am I glad she did -- and that the warranty was transferrable. (The seller was a paralegal and had carefully highlighted the clause authorizing transfers in the warranty agreement -- nice!)

After transferring the warranty online, I promptly forgot all about it. Until, of course, when the hard drive started acting funny last Friday. Since the original warranty had expired, I was sure glad we had gotten AppleCare. We don't usually buy extended warranties on our consumer electronics or computer parts, but this purchase turned out to be a good gamble.  (At the store while picking up my machine a few days later, I asked how much it would have cost to just pay out of pocket for the repair. The reply: $85 to troubleshoot, plus around $300 for the 320GB drive. Ouch!)

Sometimes we would see that question mark at boot time. Once or twice, I got the machine to boot, but it will take 10 minutes. "What is this," I thought, "a Windows machine?"  :-)

Next stop: Google. 

• I tried rebooting while holding down various keys down to reset the Mac's PRAM and NVRAM. No dice. 
• I tried booting from the Mac OS X installation disc which came with the machine to run Disk Utility, which "saw" the drive. I tried tried running Disk First Aid, which took about 15 minutes and failed halfway through its session. Uh-oh.
• The next time I booted from the OS X installation disc, Disk Utility didn't even "see" the drive. Double uh-oh.

Next station: AppleCare tech support. I called in Saturday morning.

The technician had me basically repeat the above. When that didn't work, he tried to have me boot from a utility CD-ROM which came with the AppleCare Protection Plan. It had TechTool Deluxe on it, a diagnostic utility, but it wouldn't boot for some reason. During one of our reboot-while-holding-down-the-option-key sessions, the Startup Manager launched and "saw" the drive.  So we selected it and the iMac got through about 1/3 of its boot sequence in 5 minutes.

At that point, we gave up, and the tech support rep made an appointment for me to take it down to my local Apple Store later that afternoon. It's nice that he was able to do this so I didn't have to.

Overall, the session lasted a little under an hour and would have been way better if (1) the phone connection had less delay (call center in India?) and (2) the technician  had listened more instead of just walking through his troubleshooting checklist without listening to what I had already done. Overall, I'd give them a B for the overall phone tech support experience.

  

Next post: the Apple Store repair experience.

Our iMac is back, as good as new

You do not want to see this icon when you boot your Mac. It means your Mac can't boot off its internal hard drive.

The best case is that the disk's volume data (essentially, your hard drive's table of contents) has somehow gotten corrupted or the Mac has forgotten which disk to boot, both of which can be fixed with special reboots or Disk Utility from your Mac startup CD or DVD.

The worst case (as it was for us) means that your hard drive is dead and needs to be replaced.

In my role as "tech support for my friends and family", I've gotten a bunch of questions about what happened and what my backup regimen is. So over the next few posts, I'll describe what happened, what I did to restore our data, my experiences with Apple tech support, and what we do to backup data.

Here's the Reader's Digest version:

• After a call with Apple tech support where we tried various reboots and software-based repairs, I took the iMac down to the local Apple Store and they replaced the drive with a brand new one.
• We had a Time Machine backup on the HP MediaSmart server, so we didn't lose any data.
• After restoring from Time Machine (my first successful computer restore experience ever, I think) and a few application re-installs (most Mac apps don't need this, but I'll name names for the few which do), we're back in action. Hurrah!

Details coming soon, but if you have not backed up, please please please do so. This is 100x true for the drive with your completely irreplaceable videos and pictures. These days, even Quicken data doesn't seem that sacred to me -- but our pictures and videos absolutely are. (Thankfully, our photos were on an external drive which is itself backed up to two separate drives in the MediaSmart server, so they weren't on the drive that failed.)

Our family does not have a physical disaster emergency prepardness plan (yes, I know -- it's on the list with getting our trust notarized), but we do have a data disaster plan. You should too, if any of your data is important to you.