i feel like steve jobs is playing a cruel game of punk’d on me.

so here’s the deal.  i have a macbook.  many applications that i want to use don’t work or don’t seem to be entirely supported or have weird issues in tiger (such as the bizarre instance of photoshop not being able to open .psds).  plus, spore requires 10.5.3, and spore on the mac would be awesome.  so i finally decide to try to upgrade from tiger (10.4.11) to the latest leopard (10.5.5).  

that’s when i started reconsidering suicide.  or at least technocide.

leopard installed okay the first time around. in fact, better than — it was more responsive and had a faster boot time.  so i did the software updates…which proceeded to kill everything.  after the 10.5.5 combo update, the laptop would no longer boot.  ultimately, i had to start over from scratch — erase everything i had installed and do a new install.  here’s the summary:

for some reason, every install directly from the 10.5 disk failed.
trying an archive & install (that keeps all your old settings and applications) didn’t boot after it got trashed from the update.
which means i would need to install 10.4 first and upgrade.
the 10.5.5 combo update, according to various mac forums, seemed to have issues for some people, so I did each incremental update separately, but I only got as far as 10.5.1 before i started having more issues.

so here’s my dilemma.  i love osx, i really do.  if i had a choice, i’d use it as my de facto operating system.  but i don’t want to spend another 2-3 hours hacking away at the laptop to try (and possibly fail.  again) to get it up to 10.5.  i thought about running time machine, and making a backup as soon as i have a successful install of 10.5 so at least i have a restore point when it fails, but that just means that i’m expecting to fail when i install the updates.  i’d rather not just expect to fail.

so my options are:

install tiger again and leave it.  possibly funky-acting programs and no support for current/next-gen applications (making the laptop dated).
install tiger again and sell it.  possibly using the money to buy one o’ dem fancy schmancy asus eee pc’s which i read have had osx86 successfully installed on them.
install something completely different.  i downloaded and was this close to installing the google linux distro, gOS — the biggest detractor was, a) no app support for what i wanted, i’d have to find possibly lesser-quality equivalents of what i want and expect the adobe suite to not work 100% (so back where i started with that), plus, what’s a google OS without chrome?  seriously.  considering waiting until they finish chrome for linux and inevitably release a new gOS with chrome out of the box.

ultimately, installing something completely different doesn’t solve anything, but the install process would be like 15 minutes vs. 2 hours.  and my sketchy cd-rom drive just keeps getting worse everytime i do this, so by the end i’m kind of expecting that it won’t accept any cds anymore at all, which doesn’t help things.

so i’m at a loss.  what do y’all think?

in other news of simplifying things, google chrome…

i have been a firefox=aholic for a good long while.  way back in the beginnings of the internet, i wasn’t ever totally satisfied with internet explorer, and netscape was always too bloated, so i tried every browser i could get my hands on.  i settled on opera for a long, long time — mozilla always seemed to embody the bad things of netscape — until i got introduced to firefox.  now there’s google chrome and it changes everything.

i knew google was working on something, saw a couple of hits from “chrome” in my analytics and thought that it was a new beta mozilla browser (the folder that contains application and user data in firefox — as well as the mozilla browser, i believe — is chrome), but it wasn’t until i saw some mention of google chrome in wired and slashdot and various other tech blogs.  of course i installed it — i like google gadgets, a google browser?  sure, i’m game.  i went to look for more information and found this: a web comic by scott mccloud that talks about how chrome is different.  one of the important differences is that each tab is a separate process.  so if one tab gets hung, your whole browser doesn’t suck up all your resources and kill your computer — and if it starts to, you can kill that tab and then you’re fixed.  chrome apparently (and i haven’t tested this yet because i haven’t gotten a stuck process or memory leak) identifies the bad tab to inform you which one is causing the problem.  or you can open the chrome task manager and find out who’s hogging the resources.

the downside is just that there aren’t many plugins yet, including the ever-necessary web developer tools.  but that’s okay, because i’d need to check in ff (and ie) for compatibility anyway.  check out the new chrome browser here.

so we got a new client for thinktank.  it’s a wordpress blog, and it’s mostly maintenance and updates, but it’s still pretty cool.  our client wants to build/integrate a social networking component, so i did some researching and found KickApps Social Networking Software.  the more i read into it and compared the alternatives, the cooler (and more KickAss) KickApps became.  they run a SaaS — Software as a Service, an intriguing concept Wired wrote an article about a while back.  what it means in this case is that the social networking software is provided by and hosted on KickApps’ servers.  you setup the gateway, and everything else lives on their side.  which means less twiddling, infinitely easier setup, no maintenance (other than cosmetic stuff) and also means, for them, that they get to control the flow of traffic and how things work monitarily.  you see, as a free service, they control 2/3 of the ads that show up on the site.  1 of the 3 ad banners you control and can set up as you please.  there’s an option to buy out the ads, but according to the video on their site, it starts at $100/month for 5000 clicks — not a small-scale deal.  they have an impressive client list though; professional sports teams, vibe, npr, universal music, etc.  and it plugs right into the standard cms apps.  not just joomla! and drupal but also wordpress.  it’s exciting enough of a concept to tempt me to create an account and set one up here.  even though, you know, no one visits me, really.

i also just finished optimizing this blog for search engines.  from which i learned a few things about seo-friendly coding, and hopefully does something to counter the last part of the paragraph above.  all this seo’izing and working on a new blog made me think of making affiliate buttons for thinktank.  well, the other thing that made me think of that was the email i got that said that firefox set the world record for most downloads in a 24 hour period for the firefox 3 download day campaign.  it all made me think that creating more ways for people to link back to thinktank couldn’t hurt, and the buttons are prettier than my cleverly unobtrusive “website designed by thinktank” tag at the bottom of our sites.  oh, the other thing the seo stuff taught me (or reminded me, really, i already knew it, but i wasn’t implementing it) was that it’s better to link the whole phrase “website designed by thinktank” than just the “thinktank” which is what i was doing before.

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in other news, i got my computer working again, although i haven’t had a chance to look at the old hard drive, see if it’s usable, and figure out wtf happened.  for, you know, fun, and because i wanted to figure out what hardware i should get, or more accurately, if the hardware i was planning on getting would be comparable, i downloaded 3Dmark06 — the standard benchmarking tool that gaming magazines use to rate.  it seemed kind of silly to be using this benchmarking tool that i’ve read about in computer gaming world, but i wanted to see how erin’s system (roughly the equivalent of my broken system) compared with the media center which i was using (roughly the estimated equivalent of what i would be using).  i made a fatal error in doing this — while the mainboard and processors would be comparable (the mainboard i got was a mini version of the one i’m using in the media center) the fantastic graphics i was experiencing in guild wars on the media center was not due to a highly advanced onboard graphics processor which was my assumption at the time.  in fact, it was from the graphics card i got for the media center specifically because i needed s-video out to go to the tv.  as such, erin’s computer with an nvidia geforce 6600 ranked about a 600 and some change on the 3Dmark06 test.  the media center (not designed as a gaming computer by any means and only holding 1gb ram) ranked a 300.  these were, of course, piddly compared to the high scores of people who actually cared to build a gaming system and uploaded their scores to futuremark’s database.  so my plan was to get 4gb ram to overcompensate.  but, as i wrote in one more to file under “it’s always something”, i only had 2 ram slots and my power supply wasn’t spiff enough anyway.  so, having to order a new power supply, i also ordered a new graphics card as well, an off-brand nvidia geforce 8400gs.  it was the cheapest and most powerful solution.   when the power supply came, i started installing vista ultimate, and when the graphics card arrived a couple days later i started transitioning over to my new/old system.  in all, it’s performing well.  my new 3Dmark06 score is around 1600, and guild wars nightfall looks gorgeous — pretty much like the screenshots on their site.  so i’m a fairly happy camper and using a mostly functional operating system again.  while vista isn’t as simple and intuitive as osx and the start menu is all fuXX0red — seriously more messed up than previous versions imo — it works, the glass effects are pretty and it is better than XP and it’s no 95/98 by any means.   it’s definately an advance, albeit not a ground-breaking one.  there are a couple issues:

when i started using vista on the media center i discovered a problem — while i could create new folders (and new files through the right-click option) i could not NAME them.  i.e. New Folder.  New Folder (1).  New Folder (2).  etc. etc.  no matter what i did, i couldn’t get it to work.  apparently, after googling a bit, i discovered this was fairly common and required a registry hack to fix.  annoying, and a waste of a couple hours of banging my head on the computer screen.

random lockups and freezes in explorer, especially when accessing files on a shared network drive.  both vista computers do this so i can only assume this is fairly normal as well.  also, having to log in to the network drive after every reboot is obnoxious and i’m still trying to figure out how to save my password.  :/

so that’s the scoop.  a few quick, final closing remarks:

to answer the comment in my last post: avatars are user icon things for social apps like blogs and forums and messaging programs, but also are used by microsoft to visually represent different users.  it’s sort of the digitized representation of yourself to the world.

i’m planning on sending off my 8mm reels to get transferred to dvd in the next couple weeks.  once i get the dvd back i will rip the video, add new soundtracks and post them here (possibly to youtube as well).  i’m also going to do something about the gavin video and the guy in a hat video (guy in a hat might need to move to youtube also, just for kicks).

i want a google phone.

yes, i’m playing guild wars again.

look for joss whedon’s Dr. Horrible in a couple weeks.  it’s gonna be aweX0me.