Wander and Scrawl: Pet Photography in Seattle

I would like to encourage folks considering pet or family photography to talk to my friend Heather McCutchen of Wander and Scrawl. Heather came by the house a few weeks ago and shot pictures of me and my cats. She did a great job and I highly recommend her:

Monty

When you go for a visit at Dr. Gjerdrum's Lifestyle Chiropractic office in Seattle, you're likely to meet the very friendly Monty...that's him filling the entire walkway ... don't be offended if he doesn't always get up to greet you...

Carl Pope and the Sierra Club's Aggressive E-marketing Appeals

No sooner had I blogged about National Geographic's five e-marketing emails in December, Carl Pope of the Sierra Club outdoes this ridiculous barrage with six e-marketing emails in December.

National Geographic's Aggressive E-marketing Appeals

I've received five email marketing appeals from National Geographic Live in December 2008 for their Seattle public education work:

Has anyone seen an e-appeal this aggressive? It's not very effective. I unsubscribed.

Question for iPhone 3G users

Watching old Star Trek's tonight made me wonder...would you ever trust AT&T to beam you up?

Facebook for Dummies

It's good to know this exists... I wish I had known before the holidays. I would have bought a dozen for friends and family members...

Facebook: Failed to save settings. Try again later.

For some reason, whenever I tell Facebook to show less stories about my friends (sorry Jon), it tells me "Failed to save settings. Try again later." It's been doing this for a week or so. One work around is to tell it to show me more stories, then tell it to show me less stories - that seems to work okay.

Facebook feature request: just let me list the friends I want to see in my news feed and exclude others. I have 499+ friends, but I only want my news feed to show me what's up with my closest buds and family.

What feature requests do you have for Facebook? Visit PleaseFixFacebook.com

Five new webisodes of Battlestar Galactica

There are five new short webisodes of Battlestar Galactica which you can watch on the SciFi website if you don't mind watching the same movie preview for a really dumb looking flick we won't promote here before each one.

There are also some sneak peaks to season 4.5 which starts January 16th, 2009.

Confirmed: Apple OS X 10.5.6 Update Can Break Your MacBook Pro

For Christmas this year, Apple sent me a software update that crashed my MacBook Pro. A few days after I installed the OS X 10.5.6 update, my battery ran to zero - which required a reboot for the second time since I installed the upgrade. This broke my MacBook Pro. The Apple logo would appear and the status icon would appear for a few seconds, then the screen would go black, with only the backlight shining upwards. I could not boot to safe mode, or to the Leopard install DVD.

I assumed my hard disk crashed or my logic board died. So, I made a genius bar appointment (none was available until two days after Christmas) to request a repair on my AppleCare.

Then, Christmas night, I discovered that many other MacBook Pro users were reporting the same problem (PC Mag reported it here as did MacFixIt) and I found a solution. My MacBook Pro is now fixed. It turns out that OS X upgrade 10.5.6 will break some versions of the MacBook Pro if they are running older firmware. I was not aware I was running old firmware, for some reason software update had not been flagging this.

I've excerpted the solution below - it requires an external display, keyboard and mouse:

• Powered off my MacBook Pro
• Plugged in an external display
• Plugged in an external USB Keyboard and USB Mouse
• Hit the power button on the MacBook Pro
• Closed the lid on my MacBook Pro

• As a precaution, I used TimeMachine with an external Firewire hard drive to back up my latest files.

• Deleted Caches directory files in all three places (System/Library/Caches, (My account name)/Library/Caches and (My Volume Name)/Library/Caches. I am not sure this step is necessary.

• I downloaded the MacBook Pro EFI Firmware Update from April 2008 v. 1.5.1. Apparently, I was running slightly old firmware and didn't know it. When I finally booted my MacBook with the external display, Apple had resent this software update - I am assuming they are figuring out the solution to this problem in parallel to this thread.

I ran the EFI Firmware update and shut down. Held the power on button again until I heard a longtone. The firmware update ran successfully this time and my MacBook booted okay!

Hooray, my MacBook Pro is working again. And this seems to confirm for me that the 10.5.6 update breaks some systems if you are running older firmware.

Why am I laughing?

The last scene of Free Willzyx...those South Park kids can accomplish anything they put their mind to: