Seth Godin and Hugh Macleod converse, covering lots of ground. One tidbit:

Question from Hugh: A lot of your books seem to be continuations of conversations you started with your seminal book, “Purple Cow”. Meatball Sundae I’d say would qualify, as would “Free Prize Inside” and “All Marketers Are Liars”. But then your last book, “The Dip”, was about something relatively unrelated. Do you find yourself, as an author, often feeling pulled in two different directions?

Answer from Seth: I worry about Neal Stephenson and I worry about Robert Parker.

Snowcrash and Diamond Age were brilliant books, seminal stuff that actually changed the world. That gave Neal the power to pretty much write what he wanted, but what he wants to write, it turns out I don’t want to read. I think he lost a great opportunity and I feel the loss.

Robert Parker hit it big with Spenser novels, but every one is so similar, I can’t remember which ones I’ve read and which ones I haven’t.

(snip)

Separately, Godin notes: “The web is like crack for someone with ADD, I’ll tell you that.”

I care little about Ruby or Rails, but I do want to make time for a good rant.

A wonderful reminder about reading: teach the kids to love the act, and worry about what they read later. The boy’s devouring words, and the girl is clearly on the verge of making the jump. Letters are old news, and words are starting to become known objects. I can’t wait. Selfishly, I’d like to leave Clifford behind. Generously, I envy her the jump into millions of “nows” — those moments you can’t experience yourself, except through a book.

Hey, it’s the simple things.

Good news, though, was that I left the computer there that night, and had it back, free of charge, with a brand-new power supply on Monday night. All is well once again, and my computer wakes and sleeps easier than I do once more. The Genius Bar experience was quite good all the way through, especially with the availability of online appointment scheduling. I didn’t want to be there, but all three visits were quick, and I got competent helpful people, at no charge. That is ever more rare, so it is notable.

I suppose the good news is that maybe after all this is solved, I can turn on Growl again, since it’s not longer clear that was the (only) problem.

It took a genius to figure out that Growl, the notification system for Mac OS X, was what caused the iMac G5 (PowerPC) to stop waking from sleep. I got totally fed up with unplugging the computer and restarting just to use the computer after two days, and made an appointment online to bring it to the genius.

Seriously, the genius was Ben at the Genius Bar at the Apple Store near Union Square in San Francisco. He repeated the problem which caused me to bring the computer in this evening (phew). Then he did a bunch of hardware checks without finding anything.

So, we started from another system, and the problem went away. Therefore, a software problem. First place we looked (at his suggestion) was in the Startup Items, since he’d seen that I had Quicksilver installed. He knew that utility does some low-level stuff, although he didn’t think that was necessarily the problem. I saw the Growl preference pane in the list, disabled it first, and BAM, problem solved. (I’m quite happy Quicksilver was not too blame. THAT I could not give up.)

That Growl was the problem is (a) surprising and (b) too bad.

Surprising because I’ve had Growl installed here at home for at least two months, so I’m not sure why it would start to cause a problem this week.

Too bad because I like the notifications, even though I use this computer less than the MacBook at work, where Growl is, well, growling along happily. It’s version 0.76 of the Universal Binary. I haven’t looked around to see if this problem is common/reported, but making this post to help others who may fall afoul of the sleep gods.

I was slightly misled by the slightly burnt smell coming from the computer (when I was looking at it closely). Ben at the Apple Store thought it was just dust near the processor, which really does get hot. Seems to be right.

I’m just happy I can put the computer to sleep again. I’m headed there myself.

I’m not sure what exactly finally brought the drive to its knees, but some sectors were problematic as far back as January 2006 when I first tried to get serious about backups. (And failed.)

I left things alone for the rest of the (very busy) year, but I know that there are only two kinds of people: those who have already lost data, and those who will. Only those who backup their data handle the loss well, whenever it happens. My recent mishap with my contacts probably overcame my inertia. That, and I’ve wanted to upgrade the iMac to Tiger for quite some time.

So, I fired up SuperDuper and got, well, a lot farther than 11 months earlier. All the videos, music, and photos were backed up to the external drive before things got stuck. This was the bulky data, which turned out to be very useful.

The SuperDuper log was clear that the application failed while trying to copy an IMAP archive, so I tried to clear up Mail.app’s older files, especially the mailbox in question. The file was simply a coincidence, but somewhere in the sequence of restarting (repeatedly), I ended up with the flashing folder icon. No system folder found. Argh!

The only “good” news was that I could still start the computer up in FireWire target disk mode. The bad news? The disk was unrecognizable, and I was being asked if I wanted to reformat it. I declined, and got ready to start the week, considering my options for data recovery and more.

That was Sunday evening, and it was not a great end to the weekend.

NOTE: SuperDuper was not a contributor to this sequence of events; just an ironic, unfortunate coincidence that the drive died while I was trying to (ahem) back it up.

Monday morning, I spoke with my friend Sean, and got the best tip: DiskWarrior. Fortunately, version 4.0 which works with Intel Macs was just released, so I could run the software on my work laptop while tackling the problematic G5.

Short answer: DiskWarrior was a data saver… and savior.

While I could not rebuild the drive, I could get all the data off, with the exception of the borked (technical term? should be!) System folder. Various items were “Rescued” but I’m uncertain I need them since the end goal was an upgrade to the System anyway. The data was spread across my work MacBook and a thumb drive. Fortunately, we never got a change to fill up this 250GB drive (well, 233GB formatted), or I would have been doing even more juggling.

Monday night, then, ended in a much better place. The wife had her data, and I knew that the whole process was doable. And I relaxed for a few days, doing sporadic research on internal hard drives and the process of replacing them. I scheduled a stop by the Genius Bar at the San Francisco Apple Store, just to ask a few questions.

• How long would it take for them to do the replacement? Answer: 10 business days. Ouch.
• How expensive would it be? Answer: $350. Hmmm…
• How hard is it to do this myself? Answer: Not so bad. They suggested going online and taking a look around, but since (a) the computer was already out of warranty and (b) I’d opened it up before (RAM install, and other mucking about) I was a good candidate to do it myself.

With a busy weekend and a general retail phobia during the pre-Christmas weekends, I didn’t buy a new drive until yesterday, at CompUSA. I paid more than I would have online, but I had it in my hands, and last night I installed the drive while watching the Colts demolish the Bengals on Monday Night Football.

Installing Tiger was simple from there, and I called it a night.

I still have lots of work to do, re-installing applications and re-connecting the applications with the recovered data. But I expect the applications, at least, to be completed tonight. I’m typing this while Software Update catches up.

And, yes, when I’m all done with the whole enchilida… I’ll be backing up. Wish me luck!

End result? Empty address book. Hundreds of contacts gone. And, of course, my latest backup of this information is several months old, from when I left CNET to join OpenDNS.

So, if you email me, please take the extra step to include your info beyond the email address: phone, postal, company, etc. I’ve got some reconstruction to do over the next few weeks.

This isn’t like declaring email bankruptcy, where it’s liberating to start over. It’s maddening and a reminder (again) about not just backing up, but doing it religiously in multiple places.

So, if you keep everything digitally, put a copy online somewhere, too. If you still use paper (like the wife), maybe it’s time for some photocopies stored in an envelope. Avoid this particular glitch, if you can.

One tech note: Gore’s position as a member of the Apple board of directors certainly showed in this movie. I’ve never seen so much many shots of a software program as I saw of Keynote during this film. And the PowerBook is a co-star.

But what I was struck by was that Time Machine appears to be the first popular evocation of Lifestreams, the Eric Freeman and David Gelertner attempt to replace the desktop metaphor from a decade ago. By popular, I mean something that people will actually see and (maybe) use. Gelertner’s software company MirrorWorlds appears to have slipped away, and the domain leads to a parked page. So does Scopeware, which was the name of the company in 2003, when I last noticed this idea in the wild.

I wonder if the ideas really are close enough that Apple had to license any patents?

Update: I was not the only one to make this comparison.

• Steven Berlin Johnson: Leopard First Impressions: The Time Machine
• Dave5: WWDC – A Very Scrabble Christmas (see the footnote)
• Dave Rogers: Mac: Seeing Spots