Rick's World

Another one i saw today:

Save the Ta-Tas!

This text was overlaid on a breat cancer awareness ribbon. I like it! Humorous and makes the point.

Saw this today:

I'll keep my guns,
freedom, & money...
YOU CAN KEEP THE "CHANGE!"

I couldn't agree more.

Two days ago, I happened to go by the car wash place to get my car washed. It's been needing a wash for months, and I finally got around to doing it. In the process of washing the car, I found out that a lot of the little spots of stuff that were all over the car were likely drops of tree sap. After finding this out, I suddenly figured out where those spots were coming from. There is a large palm tree in my next door neighbor's front yard that has several branches that hang over my driveway. Obviously, these branches have been dripping sap onto my car, making all those spots on it. It was time to trim those branches.

Yesterday, I decided to take care of this little problem, so I parked the car away from the driveway, got out my ladder and my pole saw and set to work. I'm there a couple feet up on the ladder sawing away at one of the branches trying to cut it down. After a few minutes of work, I manage to cut through the branch. The branch falls, and proceeds to fall right into my face. The trunk of the branch proceeds to fall and hit me square in my right eye. Like a dumbass, I wasn't wearing any eye protection. Ouch! That hurt like hell! I go inside, take out my contacts and survey the damage. Other than a cut on my lower eyelid, and my eyes being rather bloodshot, things looked OK. Of course my eye itched like hell. I just figured the itching was because I had some dirt or something from the tree in my eye. Being the typical macho male that I am, I didn't think this little injury was any big deal. No need to go to the doctor for this.

After several hours of this discomfort, I changed my mind and decided to get it checked out after all. So I hopped in my car and drove to the nearest 'Urgent Care' medical clinic. Closed on Sundays! Then I drove to the next urgent car clinic only to discover that one is closed on Sundays also. Well this is stupid! A medical clinic isn't much use if it's closed! Besides, I was trying to avoid doing too much driving with my injured eye. I could see fine out of the eye, but it was bothering me, so I didn't want to take the risk. Unfortunately, I didn't have much choice but to do some more driving. I knew of one urgent care clinic that would be open, but it was a good 15-20 miles away. Oh well, I guess I have no choice.

I drive down to this third urgent care clinic, and it's open (It's open 24 hours a day). I check myself in and sit down to wait. After an hour or so, they call me in and take me to the examination room. i then sat there for what seemed like another half hour. Thankfully, they had a little flat screen TV there that I could watch, so I watched TV while I waited. After about a half hour the doctor comes in and examines my eye up close and determines that I have a corneal abrasion (a scratch on the eye itself) as well as the scratch on the eyelid. She said that the eye would normally heal very fast, often within 24 hours, but you had to make sure that it doesn't get infected. So she prescribed some antibiotics in eyedrop form. They also gave me a tetanus shot to make sure i didn't get any problems from the exposure to the tree branch in my eye. Finally, after a lot more waiting, they let me go. They even gave me a note excusing me from work for the next two days, but telling me to make sure that I went to see my regular eye doctor this morning to have it checked out. Because of the fast healing of the eye, you have to check the eye within 24 hours. I went from the doctor's office to the only 24 hour pharmacy I could find and put in for the prescription. I then went home for the night.

This morning, I called in sick to work and made an appointment with my main eye doctor. I went to the doctor and they checked me out. Of course I forgot to bring the eye drops with me and I couldn't remember the name of the drug, so she had to call the pharmacy to get the type of drug it was. They checked it out and essentially diagnosed the same thing - superficial corneal abrasion... In other words, a minor cut on my eye. They told me to continue using the eye drops for the next week or so and to come back tomorrow morning for a quick check to see how the eye is healing.

I'm still using the drops and will continue to use them (every hour!) for the next week. I also can't wear my contacts for the next week (the only real downside). While technically I could take tomorrow off from work on doctor's advice as well, I'm going to go to work. The eye is feeling a lot better today. It still itches a little every once in a while, but is hardly noticeable. Tomorrow, I plan on going to the doctor, and then going to work from there. I'll likely be a little late to work, but I'll be there.

I got lucky and only ended up with a scratch. It could have been much worse. Always wear that eye protection when doing yard work!

A few months ago, I bought and downloaded season 4 of Lost in HD from iTunes. I've been on a serious Lost kick lately, trying to catch up to the fifth season, which just started a few days ago. I watched all the episodes (or so I thought) and finished the fourth season a while back. When the new season started a few days ago, I watched the premiere only to realize that I had missed part of the season finale of season 4. I checked my copies of the episodes in iTunes and noticed a minute or so of the last episode was missing. I thought this was all that I missed. After some checking online however, I realized I was missing the entire last episode of season 4! I didn't miss a few minutes, I missed an entire episode. I thought I hadn't downloaded it. I had backed up the entire season to DVD after I downloaded it a few months ago. So I looked back through my backups and found the missing episode. I copied the episode back only to discover that when I backed up the entire season, I'd only backed up the HD episodes. Whenever you buy an HD episode, you also get a SD (standard definition) episode 'for free'. For every episode except the last one, I had both an HD and an SD episode. Apparently when you backup HD episodes to a DVD from iTunes, it only backs up the HD episodes, and does NOT backup the SD episodes! So, essentially, when you back up HD, you only backup half of what you paid for.

The solution to this is to NOT backup HD episodes from iTunes. Instead, you need to backup the files manually. Right click on one of the episodes in iTunes and select 'Show in Finder'. From this folder make sure you back up both episodes, the regular and the HD episodes. The filenames will be named 'xxx.mp4' and 'xxx (HD).mp4' where 'xxx' is the name of the episode.

Luckily for me, I had my entire iTunes library backed up in Time Machine and was able to recover the missing SD version of that episode. Now I need to go back and re-backup both the SD and HD episodes of the series again. I have one of those problem Seagate 1.5TB hard drives as my Time Machine backup drive, and luckily I've had no problems with it, so I was able to recover the episode... I've since updated the firmware on that drive, so it shouldn't have any problems in the future

Link: https://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/selfservice/search.jsp?DocId=207931

Recently, there have been some reports of problems with Seagate's new 1.5TB hard drive. Unfortunately, I bought one of these recently before I knew about this. Today I found a knowledge base article on their site that lists all the Seagate hard drive model numbers with this problem. To my surprise, I discovered that they have some 1TB hard drives that also have the problem. Unfortunately, I have one of the affected 1TB hard drives as well! So, now I have TWO hard drives with the problem.

I've had both of these affected hard drives in my Mac Pro for a while now, without any problems, but I figured I'd better call Seagate's customer service to see if it was possible to get the firmware update that fixes the problem with my two drives, just in case. The problem was, I needed a firmware update that would work on my Mac Pro and their knowledge base article only mentions Windows. I just got off the phone with their customer support and spoke with a very friendly and helpful person about the problem. He took my name, phone, email address and serial numbers of the two drives. He told me that he would email me a disk image that I could use to boot the Mac and update the firmware (as long as it's an Intel Mac). He would be emailing me the firmware update for the 1.5TB immediately and the one for the 1.0TB on about Tuesday (apparently that one isn't quite ready yet). I haven't tried the firmware update boot CD to see if it works yet, but once I do, I'll update this blog to verify that it works.

Thank you Seagate for providing good customer service!

You can contact Seagate Technical Support at 1-800-SEAGATE (1-800-732-4283)

You can find the knowledge base article here.

If you are on a Mac, you can find the serial numbers of the HDs by doing the following:

1. Click on the Apple menu at the upper left corner of the screen.
2. Choose the 'About This Mac' menu item.
3. On the resulting dialog, click the 'More Info...' button.
4. In the next window, click the 'Serial-ATA' item in the list on the left, under 'Hardware'.
5. Click each of the hard drive model numbers in the upper right list to view the information on that drive in the bottom right list.
6. In the bottom right list, the serial number is listed to the right of 'Serial Number:'

Update 1: January 24, 2009 2:36PM

It's taken them a week and they still haven't sent me that promised email, but it looks like they've updated the knowledge base article with links to the firmware for both of my Seagate hard drives with the problem. Once I finish backing up those drives, I'll apply the firmware and see what happens.

Update 2: January 24, 2009 5:23PM

Using both of the update CDs, I was able to update the firmware on the 1.0TB and 1.5TB hard drives successfully on my MacPro. Looks like it does work on Intel Macs.