Wasted Continuum

I finally had a little time today to connect my guitar to my new MacBook and mess with GarageBand. I realized something today. I’ve completely lost my rhythm. I couldn’t hold a steady beat if my life depended on it. I was much better before when I used to jam with other people. I just kind of suck now. I need to spend less time playing the guitar and more time practicing the guitar. GarageBand is a solid program. It doesn’t have a massive amount of features, but I was able to just connect my PodXT to it without any issues. I just need to get used to the interface a little. I’m actually more used to using Soundtrack Pro. I think GarageBand will do what I want for now which is to do some multi-track recording quickly and easily.

It’s been a long day and I’m not feeling well. I woke up with a sore throat this morning. Actually the whole week has been hectic. Projects are piling up at work. When I get off work, I have Chinese New Year stuff to do. On top of that, I’ve been trying to repair my dying laptop. I still think there’s a hardware issue and it may go soon. That would really suck cause I just spent about $900 on getting new tires for my car. I can’t afford to replace my laptop right now. It’s been bugging me a lot. It’s hard on a geek to know that his laptop is dying and there’s nothing I can do about it. The fun part is that I do get to research new laptop options now. It definitely is not in my budget right now to get one.

I went to check out the MacBook Air today for the first time. It is gorgeous. It is hands-down the most stylish laptop out on the market right now. Pair it up with a Gelaskins and you’ll have every head turning when you’re sitting in a cafe with it. I have to decide if it’s too restricted with the single USB port and 80GB hard drive. The screen is beautiful and the multi-touch track pad works really well. It’s very tempting. However, the MacBook Pro has been heavily rumored to be updated in a few weeks. I think that will probably be a better time for me to make a purchase anyway.

I also checked out the new iPod Touch with the 32GB hard drive. It’s pretty much the exact same as the old ones except with more capacity. I just wanted to check out the new apps that they added to all the iPod Touches after MacWorld. I think I’ll pull the trigger on that one as soon as they drop the price. I can work with 32GB. 16GB is just unacceptable.

I’ve had major laptop issues over the weekend. Basically, my laptop has been turning off randomly and having issues booting up. I’ve been backing up my data most of last week. Today I was finally able to reinstall XP back onto it. It’s running fine so far. I have already partitioned my drive this time so that I can just re-image it next time instead of re-installing everything.

Moral of the story: backup your data. I’ve said this before. Data is never safe if it exists in one place.

I haven’t been blogging the last few days because I’ve been in the process of backing up my laptop. I do 95% of my blogging on my laptop and it’s been acting funky. I did back up my essential items, but now my laptop is being completely uncooperative. I have to try a couple more things to see if I can recover some of my non-essential but good to have things. This is why everyone should back up your data to at least two locations. Ideally, one copy will be off-site, but that can annoying. Hopefully I can get my laptop back to 100% by this week. I have a bad feeling that there may be a hardware issue. That will suck.

I just received my new 500GB drive and a new external enclosure today. Right now I’m backing up all my data on my laptop. Hopefully I’ll have it cleaned out and I’ll reinstall everything by this weekend. I think I might put XP back on there, ghost the drive, then try a linux install. So if I don’t like it, I can put XP back and not have my laptop down for too long. The 500GB is going into my desktop. I’m trying to migrate all my work/project files onto my desktop from my laptop. My hope is to have my laptop be for my minor tasks like surfing, emailing, listening to music and watching movies. All I know is that I have a lot of organizing to do. That includes my desktop too. My data is scattered. I need to reorganize it soon before it gets worse.