Wednesday, October 8th, 2008
I recently opened an account with an online stock trading platform and made my first stock purchase. I know, I know- slumping economy, bad market, the end of the world- every reason in the world not to invest. I guess I’m just exercising some faith in capitalism?
Truth is, I just want to learn the process and educate myself. Lest you think I’m some sort of big shot Wall Streeter, I’ll just say that if you knew how many shares I bought, you would laugh! I purchased a few shares of Apple Inc. (AAPL) stock. I realize that I don’t know jack about when is a good time to buy and/or sell, I just want to give it a shot.
Anyway, I’m really hoping that Apple’s announcement on Oct. 14th includes aluminum-encased MacBooks and I’m excited to find out what the “brick” is. Oh man, I’m gonna make bank!
Posted in Mac, Radical | 2 Comments »
Sunday, October 5th, 2008
Blue Screen of Death on a Mac?
I had my first major issue with my MacBook the other day. Before going to work, I shut down my computer instead of just closing it to sleep for the drive to work. When I got to work, I turned on my MacBook and after the Apple screen I saw a blue screen that didn’t look anything like this:
I gasped, “This is a Mac, there’s no blue screen of death!” After restarting the computer several times, I realized that I was not going to be able to get to the login screen and that I would be stuck staring at a blue screen all day. I asked my friend Dan (like I always do) for some advice on what to do. He suggested clearing the PRAM so we did, no luck. Because I hadn’t been using Time Machine, I used my Leopard disk and a 500 GB hard drive to make a copy of my hard drive to preserve my data and settings. This was a time intensive process but worked like magic.
After I had copied over all of my data, I reinstalled Leopard and then used the Migration Assistant to import all of my stuff back to the MacBook. The migration went smoothly and I was able to get to the login screen (no blue screen of death, w00t!). The problem at that point was that when I typed in my login password it told me that I had entered the wrong password. I was typing the correct password but I tried every password I have ever used for anything but to no avail. I ended finding an article on LifeHacker that showed me how to create an admin user from single-user mode and so that I could change my admin user account’s password. That worked like a charm.
6 hours and several evil thoughts later, I was up and running on my MacBook with everything the way it should be.
Lessons Learned
- Use Time Machine!
- Always have friends that are geekier than you are
I still have no idea why I was getting that blue screen of death.
Posted in Mac, WTF? | 3 Comments »
