Monday, January 7, 2013

Breakfast: pumpkin-seed-encrusted rolls with Zimmerman's Humboldt Medley jam. Rode my bike to work. Linkchecking, kiosk work. Posted signs in the IRC. Chatted briefly with student KH. Helped Joel and Rick with a PharmAdMIT issue. Set up my new iMac. Migrated files over the network from my old Mac Pro—this took almost the entire day. Lunch at Burgermeister: veggie burger with fries, lemonade, about $12. Java install. Upon restart, I received a circle-slash with spinning gear. Tried starting in Safe Mode by holding Shift during restart. This did not work. After some time the Apple with spinner changed to a circle-slash with spinner. Started recovery mode with Command+Option+R—it started successfully. Opened Disk Utility and ran verify disk—no problems with the disk. I ran repair disk permissions. It found some permissions to fix and fixed them. I ran repair disk even though verify found no errors. Restarted normally. Apple with spinner, then after a few minutes this changed to a circle-slash with spinner. Back to recovery mode. Reinstalled Mountain Lion from recovery mode. On the old computer, I verified disks and repaired permissions in Disk Utility. Windows drive = ok. Time Machine drive had problems. Startup drive = ok. On the new computer, the reinstall of OS X completed successfully, and upon restart I received Apple with spinner, then after a few minutes this changed to a circle-slash with spinner. Called Apple Support, spoke with Jonathan who instructed me to reinstall OS X again but erase the drive first. If that didn't work he gave me a different number to call to handle a return shipment. I erased the drive and reinstalled OS X. Back to the old computer: ran repair disk on the Time Machine drive. New computer OS X reinstall completed. I completed setup without migrating data. Restart succeeded, and I logged in. Set some trackpad and mouse system preferences. Shut down. Cold start—successful. Restart—successful (twice). Began manually copying data from the old computer to the new computer. Set lots of system preferences on the new computer. Prepared items for surplus and created a draft request. Rode my bike home. Had trouble with the lock on our door. Checked Patrick's key and it had the same problem, so I reported it to Ed. Dinner at home with Patrick: he ate chicken soup from Simmone, I ate red-pepper-and-tomato soup from a box and corn off the cob from frozen both with a little diced parsley, salt, pepper. Tested an Apple SuperDrive purchased in November 2012 with an iMac purchased in December 2012 and received in January 2013. It successfully played our DVD of Hero after encountering an error at the beginning. Deleted my Meetup account because it continued to send me email messages I didn't want even after I selected the unsubscribe link. Uninstalled Arcana Startup Sound, which seems to not work past 10.6.8. Downloaded SEP to reinstall to resolve error message "Insecure Startup Item disabled. (/Library/StartupItems/[item name]) has not been started because it does not have the proper security settings." Continued editing Patrick's new book: page 66 to 68. Removed and reinstalled SEP. Configured scans. Dessert: two chocolate-covered cherries.