Working on my newish MBP today I noticed it beachballing like crazy. So I pointed Disk Utilities at the boot drive and kept working. After repairing permissions I had DU run a Verify Disk and the report instructed me to reboot into recovery mode and run DU / Repair Disk from there. It’s been years since I felt like I had to be suspicious of Apple’s maintenance toolkit so I just toddled off and did that last thing before bed.

DU couldn’t repair the drive and suggested a hasty immediate backup followed by a wipe and restore or reinstall. No problem, thinks I, and went to reboot the machine into the main partition.

Naturally, it won’t. 

Casting about for the external boot drive I used to set the machine up a few months ago I am surprised to note, oops, I cannibalized them when I finally bumped us all over to Yosemite, two years after that vesion of the OS was released. I do still have the original bootable Mavericks drive that was migrated up to Yosemite in August or whenever it was, so I can rebuild from scratch, but fuck me, it’s Christmas! I won’t have time to do that for a fucking week.

The data I want and need and have been working with is all fine, my habitual local working directories are all mirrored to other machines in the house and I can just work from the Mac Pro downstairs to finish the specific deliverables I have for a client in the morning. So there’s some good news. But what a colossal pain in the ass, and what an idiot I am for not putting on the bakes and running a quick clone to an external drive before fucking around with the recovery tools. Lesson learned, I suppose. Yeesh.

After our return from Cuba in September, I spent more than a month working on a dual-media project for our photos and such to distribute to the family. The components were a large glossy hardback photo book and a DVD, with the DVD tipped into the back of the book. 

I ended up ordering four copies via Blurb.com, at my aunt Anne Tayloe’s suggestion. The first round of books had a serius error in the submission and I ended up having to argue with them to get the order refunded while placing another. The first order was discounted at 50% and the second at 40%. The 86 page books cost individually about $60 in the end, taxes and what not included. They are large, like 11 x 13 inches or so.

Anyway, the books have started to land in the hands of their intended owners, so it’s time to make the PDF available.

Of course, as soon as the books came in, I found typos in the essays I had written for the material. At any rate, there are maps showing where we were, a timeline, and brief captions. I hope you enjoy it.

CUBA 2016

That’s a link to a google-hosted copy.

The books use about 300 pictures out of the 2000 or so we took while there. I used about 600 of these for the DVD. I also made that set of pictures available as an Apple-hosted picture gallery.

CUBA COMPLETE 2016

I have a couple thousand words of mostly raw notes that I do intend to use as the basis of a series of blog entries here. That will come in 2017, I expect.

I am posting this today, Christmas of 2016, to provide a single point of access to the gallery and PDF.