Back in the swing...

Time to move on.

January and February look like they're going to be incredibly busy times for me. With the unplanned downtime over Christmas and New Year I never managed to create a buffer of shows to create some breathing space and also look at some other projects I was hoping to get underway. So as well as preparing and producing the weekly shows, I need to create the 2009 DVD Archive for members, as well as as preparing my sessions for Macworld (never mind the two months worth of expenses and accounts I need to straighten out for the VAT return at the end of the month)!

Looks like I've got my work cut out for me!

First thing I applied myself too today was checking out all the Things tasks I'd neglected over the past few weeks. A bit of rescheduling managed to make the list a bit more manageable.

One thing I did get sorted was to book a repair for the Mac Pro that flaked out a week or two ago. I could have wrestled the machine down to the Apple Store but who wants to do that with a Mac Pro. So I thought I'd endure the pain of going through AppleCare telephone support. Actually, it wasn't that bad but I'd already been through the steps the guy lead me through. He eventually came to the same conclusion that I really needed a hardware repair - I think the logic board has gone myself. 

No home visits available but he was able to put me in touch with an authorised Apple repair centre who will pick up the machine, repair it and drop it back. 

Much more civilised! 

So that's one achievement for today.

Just three more truly overdue tasks and I'll call it a day. Some news of gadgets and travels to tell you about, but I'll leave that for later in the week.

YTC013 - Snow

Disaster averted...

Happily ploughing through my email inbox this morning, trying to get on top of things, when suddenly, the Mac Pro "kernel panicked". To the uninitiated, or to those who still think Macs don't crash, this is the equivalent of the Windows "Blue Screen of Death" on a Mac, albeit handled much more elegantly by a slowly rising curtain of darkness with a multilingual message displayed centre screen.

Anyhow, it means the whole Mac has crashed and you need to power down and power back up.

Since getting a Mac 5 or 6 years ago, this has happened six or seven times on various machines and usually a reboot fixes things.

Except this time...

The Mac Pro would not boot.

Not "pining for the fjords" or simply "stunned", it was a true "Norwegian Blue".

No chimes, just a laboured sound of a fan spinning up and down again in a cycle.

Oh dear!

Baring in mind this was my main production machine, an icy chill ran down my spine when I realised the severity of the problem. 

Luckily, this only lasted for a second or two as I had a contingency plan.

Back when the Nehalem Mac Pros came out (you know, the ludicrously expensive ones), my local Apple store contacted me to see if I'd be interested in one of the pre-Nehalem Mac Pros at a knock down price. To cut a long story short, I said yes! The main idea was that I could use two Mac Pros as a distributed encoding system but to be honest, due to the flakyness of Compressor, this never really worked out. The second reason was to have a backup machine, you know, just in case I ever had a problem with my main production machine.

Like today!

So within 5 minutes of the problem, I had both Mac Pros disconnected and next to one another.

A single flick of the lock both side panels were off.

Pulled 4 drives out of each machine and swapped them over - no tools required

Removed the Expansion Card holder in each machine (4 screws)

Moved my CompressHD card and MX02 card from the production machine to the Spare and replaced the gard holder.

Panels back on and reconnect.

Within 15 minutes I had the spare Mac pRo back up and running with the identical configuration as before and I'm back in business.

The "spare" Mac Pro was being used by my wife so in order to keep her working, I took the boot drive from the spare Mac Pro and inserted it into the Voyager Quad Interface and connected it to my old 17" MacBook Pro via Firewire. Chose the external drive as the boot drive and she's working away exactly the same as before.

All that is left is for me to battle through the snow to take this Mac Pro back to the Apple store for repair. Wish that Apple did a home repair service - I'd pay for that.

So my folly of buying a second Mac Pro has now been completely justified and it's a huge relief to know I can carry on regardless. 

As an aside, the ease at which you can transport drives between machines and how OSX can boot machines with external drives without the slightest hiccup is one of the most impressive features of using Macs, especially when comparing the nightmare of trying to boot a mixture of Windows machines. It just makes it so easy to support and should be one of the reasons why businesses and corporates should take Macs more seriously. 

Update on Wednesday, January 20, 2010 at 10:12PM by Don McAllister

The Mac Pro is now safely back from the repair shop. It seems they needed to replace the logic board. 

YTC012 - Kodak Zi8

Kicking back...

Just so you know, I think I'll postpone the daily blog post entries and the YouTube video comments over the Christmas and New Year period. How about re-starting on the 4th January.

That's not to say I won't be working over the same period,  the ScreenCastsOnline shows will continue with a new one to be published Christmas Eve and another on 1st January. 

I should be able to throttle back a bit and dip in and out of some other ScreenCastsOnline related stuff as and when required.

Have a great Christmas and New Year!