Monday July 03, 2006 6:50 am Lethbridge Alberta

A. Morning Musings

6:50 am There are a few high clouds this morning. The temperature is +9 C with a forecast high of +30 C and a 30% chance of showers in the afternoon. Today is a national holiday (in order to make Canada Day a 3-day weekend).

We continue to find little jobs that need doing around the house. Yesterday I patched some cracks in the cement near the rear garage door and will finish that job today. Phyllis finished painting the garage door and then decided to paint the rear outside wall of the garage where some of the paint had been peeling off. This morning I plan to pull the weeds out of the cracks in the driveway and fill them in with some sand that is left over from the patio brick sidewalk. Nonetheless, I expect to have all the chores completed by tomorrow.

 

B. Plan

Immediate
Chores	Remove weeds from front driveway	2 hr
	Repair cement step at rear of garage	1 hr
Health	Walk & exercise	1 hr
Technology	Experiment with partitioning Maxtor for both Mac & PC use	6 hr
Literature	Continue reading "The Time In Between" by David Bergen	1 hr
Later
Chores	Take cement blocks to landfill	2 hr
	Take stuff to Salvation Army	1 hr
	Take 5th wheel in for maintenance	2 hr
	Investigate water softeners for home	2 hr
Technology	Read manual for cell phone	1 hr
	Transfer music to iPod
	Install Skype on MacBook
	digital photography
	try using extender lens and monopod	2 hr
Mathematics	Larson "Calculus"
	Read "The Computational Beauty of Nature" Chap 2	1 hr
	Gardner "The Colossal Book of Short Puzzles"
History	Continue reading "Citizens"
	Watson "Ideas"
Model Trains	Visit Lethbridge Model Train club at 7 PM on Tues	2 hr
	Add blue backdrop to layout	2 hr
	Review layout for under the table turnouts
	Wire lower mainline track for a power block
	Fasten lower mainline track to layout
	Draw schematic diagram of track layout	2 hr

C. Actual/Notes

Previous	Technology Session 3	Next
Technology Chronology
7:10 am I am going to partition the Maxtor hard drive I bought yesterday and see if I can read and write files when the MacBook is in both Mac and PC mode using Parallels. I think I would like 5 partitions: 2 for the PC mode - one for backup and one for drag-and-drop, and 3 for the Mac mode - 2 as for the PC plus one for photos. The first step is to unpack the box. The second step is to read the manual. The third step is to install the software from the CD. The fourth step is to attach the hard drive to the Mac. The fifth step is to partition the hard drive. The sixth step is to try dragging a file to the Mac partition. The seventh step is to try creating a backup file on the Mac partition. 9:00 am The seventh step is proving to be problematic. I am not sure what the software is trying to do, nor am I sure that it is working. The occasional screen displays are not meaningful to me. I have begun copying the iPhotos file folder to the Mac Photos partition. That seems to have worked. Now for the big test. I am about to use Parallels to switch to Windows. I want to see if I can read and write to the two PC partitions. Nope. Windows fails to recognize the two partitions. One possibility is that I did see a window that gave a USB driver. But I have attached the hard drive using a Firewire cable since that is faster than a USB2 cable. In order to test this possibility, I will have to turn the power off and then switch the cable. 11:00 am No luck. I am still not able to recognize any peripherals when in Windows. I feel that it must involve some setting, but I can't figure it out. I have tried joining a MacOSX discussion forum, but have yet to receive an email giving me authorization to post a message. Four hours is more than enough for this today. 9:10 PM I spent about another 2 hours this afternoon trying out various options with Parallels. I eventually was able to get Windows xp to recognize the 2 PC partitions on the external hard drive and Mac OS X recognizes all 5 partitions. The bad news is that as near as I can figure I must turn the drive off before I use Parallels - otherwise the Windows version thinks the drive is busy and fails to recognize it. This is not great. I think it would work better if I had 2 hard drives, one for the Mac and one for the Windows, but this is getting silly. I think I will opt for reformatting the hard drive with only 3 Mac partitions and not use it with Windows. If it turns out that I am doing some important work on Windows that needs backing up, then I will think about a second hard drive. I just finished checking for Mac OS X updates (there were 5). After they were downloaded and installed I tried clicking on the Skype file that I downloaded a couple of days ago. This time it worked fine. Clearly, if anything is ever clear with technology, the update made a difference.

 

D. Reflection