file under: essential viewing
More like “required viewing”, Gunner Palace is a documentary about the U.S. Army in Baghdad during 2003-2004 - - following the invasion (”bomb it”) and during the occupation (”build it”). What you get is the perspective of those U.S. Army soldiers during this period. Interesting the way that morale flakes and flies all over the place. Worth viewing - - and toned down enough that you don’t need a strong stomach. (That lurks just off-screen.)
Interesting scene:
Soldier inspecting retrofit armor attached to a Humvee. “This is what our $87 trillion budget gets us. Light Humvees that we get to slap this armor onto made out of–” slaps the hull “–metal? Made in Iraq. And will slow down the IED’s explosion just enough so the shrapnel gets lodged in your body instead of passing straight through.”
So to follow up on today’s earlier post, there was no reviving Malkovich. It did not boot up on its own after 24 hours of cooling off. So I thought/hoped that maybe if I re-seated the SATA drive connectors that we would at least get one final access on this drive. Wrong again. Got inside (with a little help) and unplugged/replugged but the same failure to boot was the result. So no success there. But I guess we could call it “good practice” for when I’ll replace the drive in a couple of days…
Interesting observations:
- the screws along the bottom of the iMac don’t come all the way out (so you can’t lose them)
- the screws holding the hard drive in place are not the ones you think they are (which is a relief b/c I don’t have an Allen wrench handy)
- yes, it is a good idea to pull the memory out first
- I don’t know what’s up with that “HD heat” sensor cable but it is a pain in the ass to pull out (and unnecessarily adds about 10 minutes to the procedure)
Now to rid myself of my “computer killing electro-magnetic field“…
Last night’s hard drive failure really has me bummed out. Way to kick in the post-vacation blues… It could definitely “be worse” - - I could have nothing backed up. I could have deleted the gargantuan .tar back-up of the iTunes library. KetelOne could have gone down at the same time. But as it stands, I’m just thinking about the pain in the ass that it’s going to be to go through the reinstallation of the OS and then all my apps and restoring ~ folders from back-ups and then the slow and painful process of discovering what items did not get backed up. I have this sneaking suspicion (for example) that the Quicken file did not saved to the “Craig” external drive.
It’s enough to make me want to gouge out my eyeballs.
Right now I’m clinging to this pathetic hope that after 24 hours of “cooling off” I’ll be able to get Malkovich to come back online one last time with that drive and make a mad dash to grab items from ~rob…
It also all has me thinking about how great AppleCare Tech Support is - - and asking (A’s question: “Could it be that it’s so good because it breaks all the time?” Their “out” here is that if it really is a bad hard drive then we can fall back on: “Well, we sub-contract the drives out to…” But the fact of the matter remains that I haven’t had these weird problems on KetelOne under Panther.
kuro5hin.org points out that a story from The Onion actually became a reality. re: “Fuck everything, we’re going to five blades” - - at the time I thought it was the funniest article ever to appear on The Onion. I hope they’re not this prophetic all the time.
