iGame Radio

You know how all of those media outlets like to hype up disastrous events? Snowstorm [insert your favorite date here]! They then spend 24/7 giving you every little detail of the event, including crap that really doesn’t in any way add to experience except to make you a part of it in revenge for you not actually being there? The rubberneck syndrome.

I will spare you the intimate and tiny details of the past five days. You don’t need to hear about the screaming, the tears, the threats to various machines about ending up on the scrap heap. Such details are best left unspoken (certainly unspoken more than I’ve already done).

Suffice to say that after my G5 committed seppuku, I took her harddrive out and couldn’t find a single Mac, Intel or PPC, in the house that would read the damned thing. My husband finally hooked up this harddrive to his Linux box via a USB external harddrive enclosure (thank-you Macally!) and miraculously he could actually read it. Thus began the long, arduous movement of files and folders from his box to my new Mac Pro.

Not everything has been moved over (there are still some game folders that need to be moved). And I’m sure I’ll start up an application that I haven’t tested yet that will need me to attend to it in some way. But as of today, my new machine, Cress, is working just fine. And the half of my brain that resides in that harddrive is living comfortably in the new one.

So, what have I learned from this experience? Several things.

1. Migration Assistant sucks giant donkey wankers. I’m not kidding here. Especially if you are trying to move accounts from a PPC Mac to an Intel one, DON’T USE IT. There are other ways that may take a little bit longer, but won’t result in you losing access to your harddrive through accidental corruption. And, yes, I’m blaming Migration Assistant completely for this. My G5 was working just fine until that stupid application crapped out in the middle of the move…now I can’t read the harddrive and the G5 won’t come up at all.
2. Linux users are FTW! (But I still won’t own one.)
3. NEVERNEVERNEVERNEVERNEVERNEVERNEVERNEVERNEVERNEVERNEVERNEVERNEVER EVER DON’T DO A BACKUP!!!!!!! If I’d had the damn backup, this move would not have taken so long after my G5 had blown up.

One of the really nice things about this whole incident is that it allowed me to do a long needed complete cleaning of my office. And boy, did this office need that. To give you a really visual idea, while moving my old Windows box (I’ll be creating a Windows partition and installing XP soon, so she’ll be going away too), the side shield fell off (it’s not screwed in…this thing is really old, 999 MHZ speed). I was engulfed by dust bunnies. They’d been breeding at a miraculous rate. I vacuumed them up. Then I gave the box a good, hard blow (and the sex jokes shall commence in 3…2…1), then vacuumed again. Another blow, and another vacuum, before the thing was reasonably clean. It was astounding that this machine was still running. So, PSA…if you haven’t done it in a while, go give your machines a nice, long, hard blow. ;)

Podcasting shall resume next week, on schedule. I am working on getting some thoughts from GDC (since I’m not going). Will have some great reviews (I’m playing Dragon Age: Origins, Tales of Monkey Island, am just now downloading Star Wars [insert really long name here], as well as some awesome iPhone games). And Corey and Peter will be back over the next few weeks too! Don’t miss out.