Sunday afternoon was when I discovered that my Macbook was unresponsive. I was getting blue-screen infinite loading loops on startup. I called Apple Support, and after a number of steps through the basic methods of identifying problems, the rep decided to schedule me with an appointment at my local Apple store. I then had to rely on my Windows Vista desktop, which is mostly a gaming machine, to work for the next two days. It was manageable, but not quite as comfortable as the software I had gotten used to on my Macbook.

When I visited the Genius Bar on Tuesday, it took about 5 minutes for the rep to load a Firewire Drive on my Macbook and determine that my HD volume was unavailable and could not be mounted; the same result I got while on the phone with support. I asked a question I already knew the answer to; does Apple cover data recovery? Even considering that this crash was Apple's fault, the answer was no. When I insisted that data recovery was priority one, the rep gave me a couple business cards for data recovery shops and sent me on my way.

I called the one dedicated to Macs in South Jersey and got an estimate for $500 to over $1000 depending on whether the problem was software or hardware based. As much as I needed to recover my files, $500 seemed a bit steep, especially with the economy and whatnot. I walked back into the store resolving to give up on recovering the data and asked the rep if all there was to do at this point was to erase, partition & reinstall OSX on the HD. She said yes, so I decided to take it on myself.

When I got home, however, I couldn't bring myself to just erase the whole drive. I figured, I still had not tried everything possible. I started up the disk utility again and saw something different from what I had seen before; my faulty HD volume was actually showing up. After running "verify" and "repair," the volume could not be fixed, but I was motivated to find new solutions since I knew that if the volume could be found, then it could probably be repaired by 3rd party software.

I should mention at this point that a friend visited and brought his Macbook + firewire cable so we could try firewire target mode. This failed miserably. Since the drive could not be mounted, there was no way to detect it with another computer.

Back on my own, I resolved to dust off an old external HD and try installing OSX on it. This went fine, so I was then able to boot using this HD and install a demo of Data Rescue II. I would have done a demo of DiskWarrior, but there is no such thing. Not knowing whether either of these programs would actually recover my data, I figured the one with a demo option would be a better place to start testing.

After finally installing & running the Data Rescue II demo, I was able to run it on my internal HD and it managed to find all my files without any problems at all. Once I saw all my files waiting to be saved, I was immediately sold. I bought a license for Data Rescue II without hesitation and proceed to recover all my files immediately.

Looking back on the whole recovery process, I've come to think that maybe my hard drive was always on the brink of death, considering that I've had quite a few freezes over the past couple of months. While the Apple update was a complete mess on Apple's part, it was also the final straw as far as my HD was concerned. In the future, I'm going to take Time Machine more seriously so I don't set myself up for this kind of disaster again. Now, to get back to work!

I won't waste too much time on the details, but with my Applecare Protection Plan in hand, I called Apple support and spoke to a rep. He guided me through doing a complete disconnect/reconnect, PRAM flash, and booting from the install disk. When I got there, my hard drive did not show up as a bootable partition. There was no "archive and install" option either, which means that whatever was on my hard drive may as well be lost. Unable to help me any more, the rep set me up for a Tuesday appt. at the Apple Store, which is frustrating because it means that for the next two days I'll have to work off my Windows box without much access to my work files.

A quick Google search shows that a lot of other users are having trouble with the 10.5.7 update, and the current consensus is that you shouldn't install it until Apple publishes a fix. Most people are complaining about quirks such as weird fan speeds, random freezes, and computers not waking from sleep mode. Those are major problems, but at least you can back up those machines and roll back to a previous version of Leopard. My Macbook can't even boot. It has basically been bricked and I can't do anything about it.

I might be an idiot for not backing up my machine before allowing an update to apply, but this was an automatic update and the series of prompts that appeared last night made it pretty clear that my Macbook wanted me to install the update ASAP. Plus, I figured the last thing I should have to worry about is a core update direct from Apple. I shouldn't have to be living in fear of OS updates direct from the OS vendor; I thought that was what the Windows world was notorious for. Right now, I'm thinking about my Vista desktop, which runs 64-bit Ultimate, and my wife's Vista laptop, which is an old Inspiron 6000 with Vista 32-bit Business, and how both have installed countless updates (one today even) without ever having a single problem. I'm also thinking about how in the past year that I've been using my Macbook consistently, I've noticed a lot more freezing and hanging than I ever thought I would see on an Apple product. Considering the number of users who have been negatively affected by this latest update, I'm beginning to feel rather jaded about switching to a Mac.

We'll see how things go on Tuesday.

1. I have been working on a livelesson for Prentice Hall that covers the basics of CSS in ~6 hours, and I'm almost done! If you haven't heard of these, livelessons are video tutorials that you can purchase digitally or on DVD. As far as I know, mine will be the first on the topic of CSS, and I can promise you that I've packed some really good material into it. I'll have more info about this soon, so stay tuned!
2. I am launching a site specifically for teaching CSS, as a way to follow up the impending success of my livelesson. It's called CSS Is Easy. I plan to publish more video tutorials through this site, and share links to other references & articles about CSS on the web. Even though I've said in the past that CSS is incredible difficult to master, I want to change that, and CSS Is Easy is my plan to make it happen.
3. I got married on May 23^rd, 2009. If we are friends on Facebook, you'll have access to my pictures.

• Forms.css has been vastly improved with the addition of attribute selectors (so you don't have to use .text, .button, .checkbox or .radio classes if you don't care about IE 6) and formatting code for inline forms (if you want a form to be all inline, just add the class .inline).
• The conditional comment for IE is now [if lt IE 8], because IE 8 is good enough that we don't have to apply ie.css for it!

The new forms code is something I'm very proud of. Sean K. Stewart submitted the proposed changes, and I rolled it together with some ideas of my own to make this:

/* Form fields
-------------------------------------------------------------- */
 
input[type=text],
input.text, input.title, 
textarea, select { 
  background-color:#fff; 
  border:1px solid #bbb; 
}
input[type=text]:focus, 
input.text:focus, input.title:focus, 
textarea:focus, select:focus { 
  border-color:#666; 
}
 
input[type=text], 
input.text, input.title,
textarea, select {
  margin:0.5em 0;
}
 
input.text, 
input.title   { width: 300px; padding:5px; }
input.title   { font-size:1.5em; }
textarea      { width: 390px; height: 250px; padding:5px; }
 
input[type=checkbox], input[type=radio], 
input.checkbox, input.radio { 
  position:relative; top:.25em; 
}
 
form.inline { line-height:3; }
form.inline p { margin-bottom:0; }

I highly recommend that everyone upgrade their sites to this latest version, as I can't guarantee that previous versions won't create problems with IE version 8. As always, follow Blueprint on Twitter for the latest updates.

Lemonade Tycoon

I always loved this game but never got to play it; now, it's the perfect distraction when I am waiting around with nothing to do.

Tornado Mania!

This game has two modes; Rampage is like Katamari Damacy, where your tornado grows as you destroy the landscape, with the added challenge that helicopters try to stop you with dry ice. Also, unlike Katamari, you can go right through buildings that are too large for you to pick up. Then there is Utopia mode, which I find really entertaining, where you pick up buildings through the world and use them to build a bio-dome city.

Tiki Towers

I bought this one for my wife and she fell in love with it right away. It's a puzzle game where you have to build structures that the monkeys can use to get to the exit, while allowing each one to grab a banana along the way.

In other news, I got married last Saturday so that's why I haven't been online lately. I'm starting to get back into the swing of things. More updates are coming soon!

Since Blueprint reached version 0.8, however, most of the work from the core team has been on community management, support, tools, bug fixing, and code generators like the compress scripts. I can't speak for everyone, so I'm going to take the first person for the rest of this post - it's not that I don't want to work on the Blueprint core, it's that personally, I can't think of anything that needs to be done. So you can imagine my slight amusement when this past week, someone asked via the mailing list, (and I paraphrase)

When are we getting a 1.0 release of Blueprint? Is the latest version still 0.8?

It's amusing because I don't have an answer. The way I see it, Blueprint aims to offer a reset, a grid, a typography basis, and pretty forms, and currently, it does that just fine. It also has a few plugins, including my tabs plugin, but a CSS framework is not like an actual code framework; it doesn't need plugins. You can put any CSS files you want on your site alongside Blueprint without having to call them actual plugins, and you'll get a perfectly good result. When it comes time to move on to CSS3, about 15 years from now, then Blueprint will need a massive overhaul, but as long as we are speaking CSS2.1, I'm happy with what we have. I've been using Blueprint on just about every site I've done in the past year & a half, and I've never had any trouble getting from the first phase to writing my custom CSS.

Plus, since I've been very busy with trying to get my own company off the ground for the past couple months, I haven't had much time to really dig into the Blueprint code. Redesigning the homepage, staying on the mailing list, and promoting new tools like Boks has been the most I can do. I'm not saying that I've been overwhelmed, rather, I've just assumed the role of community manager & promoter at this point. I really like the role. My point in saying this, is that if Blueprint is going to make the jump to version 0.9, and possibly even 1.0, it won't be from me. Blueprint is an open-source project on Github, currently the 4th most popular watched and 7th most popular forked repository. If there is a lot still lacking in the core files, I can't tell; it seems like at least a thousand people are very happy with where it currently stands. If there are new ideas that deserve to be expressed in Blueprint, then I'll be the first one to say: fork it, write it, push it, pull-request it. Until then, Blueprint will remain at version 0.8… a version number that doesn't mean anything other than "the current version, which works just fine."

With that being said, I'm off to review my first pull-request, which includes a couple new plugins for Blueprint. Not a significant change to the core, but a welcome breath of fresh air nonetheless.

Danger: This guy can be hard to follow; in Daft-Punk style, he's not very public about his own image, preferring instead to use symbols and artwork of himself. One thing is clear though; he does amazing stuff with electronic music. So far I don't find his 9/16 2007 EP as hot as his earlier 9/14 2007 EP, but it still blows most everything else out of the water.

Shinichi Osawa: I hadn't heard of Mr. Osawa until very recently, even though he's been around for years. His album, The One, and the followup remix album, The One+, are two of the finest productions in electronic music history. I'm hoping to eventually own both on CD. I did manage to get Kitsune Udon, which features him mixing on the second CD, and it is an excellent piece of work.

Calvin Harris: I'm still not tired of listening to Calvin's first album, I Created Disco; it's bona fide fist-pumping party material. Even more exciting is Calvin's latest release, I'm Not Alone, which has me very excited about his next album.

You can also check out my latest 8tracks mix for some stuff I've been listening to lately: Recent French Electro.

Now, about the KORG DS-10. I saw this mentioned in a magazine last week and picked it up at a Gamestop yesterday. I've toyed with the idea of making electronic music before but have never found an interface that seemed approachable (without spending $100+). This software offers a 4 drum, 2 synth, 16 pattern interface with all sorts of modifiers and effects packed into my DS, for just $30. Just playing around with it for half an hour, and viewing the demo and the online examples, I could tell it was money well spent. The whole interface gives you everything a real KORG MS-10 has, in a way that's easy to manage. You can go as deep as you want into the options, or just play with basic beats and sounds. There's a bunch of examples posted on the site I've linked that I recommend checking out. Maybe if I get some free time in a couple months, I'll post some tinkerings. In the meantime, it's back to the grindstone