So, curious why I had not yet received a cell phone bill, I looked up my account on the Cingular website. You will be unsurprised to hear that the one-month balance approached half a K, approximately $400 of which was in data charges associated with the Treo.

These charges are levied at 3 cents per kilobyte, or $30 per mb. Over the first 30 days of use, my data usage was about 14 mb, primarily in failed atempts to get AvantGo to sync.

Naturally, I renegotiated my service plan. I’m now on an unlimited data-usage plan.

Longtime readers will know in advance that while I’m pleased at my calm and methodical approach to getting a significant portion of the bill credited back in exchange for the upgrade, I loathe having been so smoothly pinballed into the entirely unreasonable total monthly service plan.

You heard it here first: after two years, no more cell phones for me. I’ve had and rejected them several times in the past, and see no compelling reason to expect that I will ever become reconciled to a one-hundred dollar monthly communication tax.

I finally fixed the comments for the Gizmos site and the Tablet Siffblog from last year. So doing gave me a creative flash. Siffblog is now co-hosted at both the siff.tabletmag.com subdomain and the more-general siffblog.com. I dinked around with date-based archiving to see if I could segment 2004’s entries from 2005’s upcoming ones, and the date-based MTDirify tags do not support use in filepaths that also refer to non-date archives such as individual page entries or category entries. WIth that in mind, date-based archive pathing is already in place.

I suspect a collaborative weblog devoted to SIFF might be of great community value. If you are planning on SIFFing this year and would like to participate, please email me. Once I have had a chance to discuss this with the Tablet folks, I will probably create a sign-up queue on the Siffblog. Coop, I am looking at you, buddy.

I had so much fun with those tables yesterday that I decided to do still more number crunching, on that time-tested blog topic, the blogiversary!

It was just over three years ago, on March 24, 2002, when I completed the initial setup on the just-released Movable Type 2 and posted my first entry, a pentimento to be developed into an opera known as “Mr. Red Ears.” The piece had originally erupted unbidden in my email to good friend and returned-to-the-East-Coast stand-up comedian Ken Goldstein, who liked it enough to repost.

At about the same time, Eric Sinclair had also begun to experiment with this newfangled bloggy thing. I had long hesitated in the shadow of my locquaciousness, avoiding the call of the pen but suspecting I might take to it. The blog appeared to offer a laboratory setting and once I was off, I was off.

Since then I have held editorial positions at two nationally-distributed magazines and written for regional and special-interest press sparsely but regularly. I think I understand the process, and I have confidence in my ability to develop a story professionally and on deadline. None of this would have happened without the blog, and at least one editor called me to comission a story based at least partly upon awareness of my work stemming from the site.

My bandmate Greg recently challenged my self-perceptions on these matters. I don’t think of myself as a writer in the way that I once thought of myself as an artist. He pointed out that my stumblebum determination to date has served me well and that realistically, the experiment has panned out. He has strongly encouraged me to shed my diffidence about identifying with the activity as a profession and to proceed aggressively toward attempting to earn a living from writing. I am still taken aback by the viewpoint but I must admit his arguments were forceful and correct.

At any rate, after tweaking this loonnng list, I was able to plop some data into Excel and get some basic metrics going.

I wrote about this once before, much longer ago than I had thought; it was well before I had been doing this for a full year.

My longest entry is one that came in the midst of what is still the strongest writing on the site: September 1988, part four, 4265 words and posted on September 20, 2002. It’s one of a four-or-five part series chronicling the death of my sister in 1988, and written with the deliberate intention of causing the reader’s personal grief to chime with my own, I hope in a cathartic and thoughtful way.

As I was writing it, advance publicity for the Wilco film I am Trying to Break Your Heart suffused my mediasphere, and the phrase stuck with me. I had just started my job with my first magazine as their online news editor (essentially a news blogger with a quota of ten daily items). I wrote the series in a frenzy, intercutting my pursuit and evaluation of the most trivial entertainment news with an attempt at serious personal investigation and excavation.

The other thing that ran through my mind that grim September, on the first anniversay of the Al Qaeda attacks in New York and Washington, was my sister’s example as a writer. In the too-short time between her high-school career and her death, she filled countless notebooks with writing of all sorts – poetry, fiction, scholastic research, journals.

I’ve still only read some of it. But one thing she wrote stuck with me as I wrote of her passage.

“I don’t beleive in writing hard anymore,” she’d recorded sometime near her death. She went on to note that emulating Kerouac was an immature writer’s strategy and that she had no intention of trying to do so any further. She had been there, done that, and moved on. Instead she intended to write as an adjunct and reflective activity.

While writing September, 1988 definitely involved “writing hard,” I was cognizant of my sister’s dictum, of not mistaking the writing for life itself. To me that has meant both a desire to maintain a clear awareness of craft and narrative strategy in my professional work, to what success I cannot say, and a commitment to writing informally here. To which you owe the pleasure of my occasional vocabularist infelicties and tpyos.

So, whoever you are, thanks for coming. I have no intention of slowing down, and Greg’s points are worthy of consideration. Check in three years from now and let’s see what’s transpired!

I beleive I have enfixinated the Powerbook.

Thesse notes on my restoration process may help someone. I reinstalled most of the system software. Some updates had to wait intil I had fixed the perms and ownership issues, which I did as follows.

In my home folder, I opened Terminal and became root:

as root:

Certain folders in mwhybark/Library had goofy permissions. They were set to 700, owner read-write-execute and all else barred. Proper Library permissions are 755. I actually hand-corrected one at a time, but I should have said:

I must note that I have not yet thoroughly tested to see if I’m done or not. For example, Missing Sync requests a reinstall; there may be other apps that are similarly wonky.

the man page for hdid explains the problem:

Beware that an image you have created and attached is considered an unknown removable device. For HFS filesystems on such a device, being unknown to the system means that the on-disk ownership of files and directories are ignored by default. On 10.2, they were dynamically replaced with the owner of /dev/console and the group unknown (gid 99). On 10.3, the group remains unknown, but the owner is whoever is currently accessing the file (joe sees that he owns the file when he looks; mary sees she owns it whenever she looks). Owners can be enabled for a particular volume permanently (see disktool/”get info” in the Finder) or temporarily (see EXAMPLES section of hdiutil(1)). Aside from whether owners are enabled, being removable means that disk arbitration will mount any volumes with special options such as nosuid.

However, this does not identify the original file ownership settings nor explain the criteria for those files that did not get remapped.

Before I forget, my current understanding of the problem and repair procedure for Odysseus is:

Problem definition: when the underlying copy tool used by CCC to create images, “ditto,” does its’ thing, in certain circumstances, file ownership records are changed to 99 from the appropriate ownership status. CCC fora indicate this problem is associated with files created under OS9 and therefore outside of the permissins and ownership management protocols of OS X. In my case, this clearly affects files that have nothing to do with OS9.

User ID 99 is a special ID which causes the files to report, falsely, that they are owned by whatever process it is that is attempting to determine ownership. Determining the proper ownership of these files and resetting them to the correct User ID is the resolution. The problem that arises is isolating and identifying the appropriate and accurate ownership setting. It may actually be impossible to do so, if the UID 99 has been assigned to files which should belong to more than a single user ID or process.

1. Restore from backup via imaging.

2. Hand restore any User directories and preferences. I beleive I may attempt to hand restore Applicaions as well, but if that fails, I can figure out any apps that were updated in the day or two we’re looking to restore to.

3. Check for the UID problem.

4. If found (it will be), dig out the initiall installation disks that came with the unit. Perform an install using the archive and restore user prefs option.

This should resolve all system-level UID and perms errors, leaving only any issues associated with user-installed applications and files in the User directory hierarchy. THe files in the User directory, in theory, can then be recursively set to belong to the user associated with that directory.

Any remaining UID errors can be isolated on an application by application basis, presumably via reinstalls.

Well, Odysseus is back home after the shortest venture into uncharted territory of all time. The machine is fully operable, but I apparently neglected some homework.

I used Carbon Copy Cloner to make a duplicate of the drive before taking it in, and afterward duplicated the Users folder daily until I took it in.

What I didn’t realize was that Disk Utility has a less cumbersome disk imaging feature intended for use as a backup and restore tool. The upshot is that somehow I scrambled the write permissions on the volume, and while it boots properly, prefs and stuff like install records, licensing keys, and the like are not being read or recognized.

So I have a longish round of repeated restores ahead of me to find the correct materials. Hopefully someone’s solved this problem previously, and I’ll beable to find out more from them.

Speaking of email, I am ready to kill Outlook.

First, (didn’t I note this previously?), in Outlook Office 2003 under XP SP2, the email program does not make a clearly documented, essential feature – redirection – available to users unless they are running the application in an Exchange server environment, and the help documents make no mention of this whatsoever. At least I have the small comfort of knowing I burned a solid four hours of support time on that ludicrous question.

Second, another crucial feature is disabled for users in non-Exchange environments. There is no way to define and use a range of correspondence templates such that the boilerplate can be easily and directly inserted at the cursor or such that the user can generate replies to inbound email directly from the template. The ideal use-case in this instance should be that a control-click on the “Reply” button would generate a contextual menu that included nested menus for the email templates.

You can define email templates, and even work with them to integrate them into user-facing widgets such as toolbars. But since the majority of boilerplate correspondence in any business environment is responses to the same seven to ten queries, the current necessary workflow – open, select, copy, close, paste – is absurd in the extreme.

I was further embatsinated by the apparent impossibility of duplicating user-created toolbars other than via manual click and point. Since a toolbar is contextually specific, only toolbars bound to a given view are accessible in that view. You can’t make your toolbar of templates and then simply drop it into every window that might spawn; you have to recreate it manually each time, as far as I was able to discover.

The upshot of this is that a one-hour setup turned into an endless four hours of miserable help-file spelunking and googlations.

Last week, as I realized I needed to drop Outlook in order to gain access to redirection, I installed Eudora 6.2 on my primary machine at work. I was appalled to see my old friend in such a state; although I was able to do the specific things that Outlook will not permit, the sad truth of the matter is that Outlook now offers a vastly superior user experience, from the comprehensive use of single-click access to the user-interaction elements (including organizational tools such as folders and flags) to the carefully designed three-column default display. By comparison, Eudora now feels irrationally organized and shaky, even recalcitrant.

Perhaps the superior naive-user experience led me to expect a similar polish behind the scenes. I don’t know. I can say that my wrists and back hurt needlessly from the stress of wrestling with the odious, abject failure of the deep UI and featureset. It’s the worst email client you can use, except for all the rest.

The Apple Store called me today to let me know that Odysseus is ready to be picked up. Given that he is a tricksy one, I half mistrust the word. I do not intend to wear my eyepatch.