I won’t get into this too much, but let’s just say transitioning to the new MacBook has not been the most pleasant experience. Yes, it is screaming fast, and I am sure I will be loving it very soon, but so far it has been a lot of headaches. To wit

• Virtual PC won’t run on it, and my Win XP license is non-transferrable that works with Virtual PC, so the nearly $300 investment there is worthless. If I buy XP Pro now, I will need to buy Vista in several months which will ultimately mean nearly $900 invested to get a working version of Windowa on my latop! Ugggghhhh!
• The battery life has been much lower than expected. On the way over to London I went through all the power on 2 fully charged batteries in less than 5 hours – the amount of time a single battery is supposed to last.
• After buying a new UK to US power converter at a local shop, it did not work. Then I went to return it and got another one. This one worked for 5 minutes before it was blown out (presumably by my laptop power demands which is odd). Even when I got my 3rd power converter which worked ok, the power level remained at 2% while it was connected, never recharging.
• So then last night, the system performed a software update which included a MacBook Firmware update. Just before this, I posted on someone’s site about my woes. But wouldn’t you know it, after the firmware update, the battery was reading 99% charged. This is just an indescribable pain as the laptop just continued to die during the day thinking it was only 2% charged – this cost me valuable hours of productivity lost.
• The last straw came just an hour ago when I was working up a very long and detailed blog post about the XPRL meeting I attended yesterday using Ecto (my favorite Blog publishing tool). It seems I forgot to transfer the serial number and it was acting in limited/lite/crippled mode. You can guess what happened. Even though I had saved it several times to ensure it would not be lost, it actually was not saving the work – it was just pretending to save it! So now I am going to have to redo the entire post….

UGGGGGGHHHHHHH!

I am trying to find a silver lining, but there is none. Sometimes you just need to accept what is and move on, letting go of the attachment to painful experiences, even when the sense of loss is enough to nearly bring on a panic attack. Especially since one of my pet peeves is losing intellectual property (like lost documents) to the ether.

At least I know it will be eventually be ok, but I really was quite pleased with the post I had written and was ready to move on to the other blog post I owe Josh Hallet for Blog Orlando, which now won’t be done till tomorrow. Sorry Josh – I will make it up to you by coming up with something good…

I don’t know how this can happen. But the laptop was dead dead. Not just dead, but double dead. The drive did not mount when I tested it here. The disk first aid failed. The grey screen of death had descended.

But then, miraculously when I turned it on at the Apple Store – the screen briefly flickered to life. My hopes restored, I actually shouted “what the fucl?” before calming down only to then see the grey screen return and the machine crash once more. I was talking to the guy at the Genius Bar (can’t believe I did not get his name) and he was trying to connect the hard drive to his laptop to run Disk Warrior, but it just would not even show up. My hopes sank again.

Then the guy said “wait, let me check something”. He took the error code I posted on my blog earlier and found some serious FU based on my mention of the trick the guy did in Miami last time with regards to squeezing the base of the left palm rest. As I sat utterly devastated that a respite was so short lived, he read something about a cable, applied the FU and the iBook restarted once again, but this time it stayed live.  I spent the next hour or so backing up everything to my 20GB iPod.

So now I have rebuilt the email database, working on the photos and I am back in business – a little further behind where I would like to be at the moment, but moving again and settling in.  The iBook is flying off to wherever they go to repair them and hopefully it will be back next week.  All nice and new and ready to go up for sale on eBay to help offset the costs of getting a new MacBook.  I hope they at least replace it with a new drive this time instead of a refubished one.  More on that in the days to come.

I can’t begin to tell you how distraught I am this morning.  Hundreds of photos from the last week, hours of audio, hundreds of emails, mindmaps and more are hanging in the balance. I have been backing up regularly, but have not had a moment in the past few days to do so since we have been so busy running around.

I have an appointment with the Apple Store this afternoon where they can hopefully do something about it.  I ran Disk First Aid and it failed.  TechTool gave me a “File Thread Mimatch Error (-92)” and the Apple Hardware Test gave me “2STF/8/3: ATA-100 ata-6 -Master”.

The part that really gets me on this is that I think Apple replaced the hard drive with a refurbished model as I have had problems with it from shortly after I received it.  Of course, I asked if they had done this and the Apple tech said they had no way of knowing if it was new or refurbed (which should have been detailed on the ticket).

So if you have sent me emails in the past week and I have not responded, please resend them again.  Things have been very hectic and moving in a really good direction, but I have been behind on email for most of July as a result.

PS – my iMac on my desktop is also still randomly rebooting itself, so I am currently without a cell phone and without a computer – being disconnected is not only disheartening, but also distressing because there is so much work to do and so little time to do it all…

Just a quick note to let you know I have been working on plans for Social Media Club and trying to refine some of the messaging (so it can be easily understood) so I can launch the blog/site.  I have also been working on trying to secure some new client work to keep the lights on around here, so if you know anyone who needs help with social media strategies, brainstorming, creative messaging, community marketing and/or user experience design – please do let me know.  While there is not a ton of time available in my schedule for humongous projects, I do have time for taking on 1 or 2 more small to medium sized projects in addition to the non-profit work and the companies that use my advisory capital services. (I need to do better marketing of my consulting services, but this will have to do in the meantime)
There is so much to talk about from the past 2 weeks, I hardly know where to start.  The good news is that Social Media Club has been generally well received by the industry leaders with whom I have spoken, Social Media Press Release discussions have begun in earnest (Thanks Constantin) and I met so many great people at this year’s Gnomedex it even blew away last year’s experience (which was a huge step on the journey of the last year).

So while I work on getting my sh!t together, please have a little patience with me – it seems that every day’s planned work is getting eaten up by unexpected, but necessary phone calls and urgent emails. Like the 2 hour call we had this evening with Sclafani Cooking School (our pro-bono small business client for BrainJams New Orleans) to review their proposed information architecture, CRM plan and blogging/newsletter strategy.  While it is hard to find the time to do such projects these days, it sure is rewarding to know that Dianne and Frank really get what we are trying to do for them and they are actively engaged in the process.  I really do need to echo Chris Schultz’s thoughts on this better and continue to breathe and ‘just chill’.

I am trying, but it sure is hard when all of this exciting stuff is happening!

Interesting social engineering experiment from a conference…

You won’t believe it – TechMeme has been hacked. I figured it was just a matter of time before something like this happened, and the Gnomedexers discovered it before anybody else did. If only Gabe was in the crowd, he might have stopped this from happening in the first place. Let’s just see how many people discover TechMeme (formerly Memeorandum) has been hacked this before Gabe does?
Chris Pirillo

technorati tags:techmeme

So I have been spending Rails Day trying to learn Ruby programming so I can interface with my programmers and perhaps develop a bit of the code myself.  Forgetting the fact that my skills in this arena don’t even include CSS let alone a good working understanding of MVC, things are pretty bumpy.  Still, I am going through all the relevant screencasts, guides and tutorials.  Perhaps by 9pm tonight I will be able to actually build the program I sketched out last night.  If not, at least I have a good base of knowledge for going forward.

I had promised myself I would stay away from learning programming languages, but I am also frustrated by not being able to get simple things done for myself, so I figured I might as well at least invest a few days in seeing how easy it really is.  Here is what I have found so far:

1. If you often exchange words for one another and don’t have a clear logical approach to follow off of a key, it becomes very difficult to make everything in the code work together without breaking… al lot!
2. Configuring the development environment is a real bitch.  None of the Mac OS X tutorials had all of the information I needed to know.  I had to poke around in different guides, help files and elsewhere just to get the pieces in place so that I could understand what where to even start.  Then the tutorial used different line commands than my environment.
3. These guys who know what they are doing go way too fast for any Nuby to follow.  Ridiculously fast – perhaps because the presentation they were giving was too time constrained.  But seriously, would it have been that hard to record another version at a slightly slower speed?  Or is this just another tactic to keep more people from learning how to program?

Well, I was able to get the test Blog app up and running, but eventually broke it somehow, even though I followed the steps exactly and double checked the code for syntax or other errors.  So I ended up throwing it out.  I guess I can try to recreate the whole thing one more time to make sure I follow everything exactly (i renamed a couple of fields for my own usage).  For now though, I am going to take a break…

technorati tags:railsday, rubynuby, rubyonrails

Blogged with Flock

Just wanted to share this piece of good news with everyone – MindJet is finally releasing the MindManager Pro v6 for the Mac OSX.  I originally bought a copy for the PC last year after seeing Hobie demo it at Gnomedex and I have been beta testing the Mac version for the past several weeks. (gosh it was hard to keep quiet about it, but I did)  Tonight they are having a release event at the Apple Store in downtown San Francisco that I am going to… where I will also be picking up my laptop which just came in this afternoon!

So stoked on so many fronts.  This also means that my iBook G4 now has a new logic board, a new hard drive, a new CD Burner and a new keyboard.  If you know of anyone interested in buying it, please contact me since I am trying to buy a new MacBook.

The best news though is that I get to use Mind Manager openly on my Mac.  I have been doing quite a bit more work with it over the last few weeks and it is definitely the way I work best.  In fact, I did my entire NetSquared presentation in it first, then exported to PPT and worked on the design and some last minute editing. It will help me deal with all the projects we have going on much better now.  MindManager for Mac brings me one step closer to getting rid of my PC – I have been waiting so long for this, but the wait was worth it completely.  Now my productivity will soar along with the great ideas that keep popping up…

Given that I will be mostly offline for a couple of days while traveling to New York for my friend’s wedding, I don’t know why I really started this process now. Well, I guess I do really – I promoted a couple of URL’s for projects that don’t have Web sites yet and wanted to give it some grounding to start if anyone looks for them in the meantime.

So that said, you might be interested in the presentation I gave on tagging yesterday at the NetSquared Conference. (Download the PPT or visit the panel session description) I am really bummed I could not make it there today for the ‘working sessions’, particularly since one of the ideas I proposed to them around the rent an expert theme is being used and I wanted to experience it first hand to see how it turns out. Anyway, I was not invited to offer my expertise as it is, and frankly I am not sure what expertise I would offer if I was.

Ultimately I am going to follow Tom Foremski’s advice and at least give each of my ideas that have domain names behind them a post here and a category so I can add more to those ideas over time. That will take a while to get done really, but hopefully I will be able to finish migrating the Chris Heuer site over to here within a week or so and get this Blog configured and cleaned up properly and resolving to my name so I can just direct people to ChrisHeuer.com for accessing the work I am doing.

So in the meantime, please pardon my dust as I get my new online home in order…