Nothing funny about feldspar

Plagioclase and I were reminiscing over lunch about my former place of work, sparked by a woman at the next table who looked like an ex-colleague.

L.’s in Executive Training now, after having been a mid-level technical manager (and a talented engineer). I realized that every technical woman I worked with over a dozen years either left the company (as I did) or moved into an HR-type position. The highest level woman in that international company is the head of HR.

This is a company that prides itself on its engineering innovation. It attracts smart women fresh from university, trains them carefully and yet once they get to a certain level of experience they are somehow no longer attracted to the technology.

Is it the technology, or the company?

Weekend Edition Sunday Puzzile

Next Week’s Challenge

Name a famous actress with four letters in her first name and five letters in her last name. Drop the last letter of her first name and the last two letters of her last name. The remaining letters, in order, will name a well-known world capital. Who is the actress and what is the capital?

(I didn’t hear this one, so I’m running a little late.)

Hint: The actress hasn’t done much in recent years, but is currently featured in a new TV show.

Read the rest of this entry »

Another sign of autumn is the first batch of squash rolls. I originally got this recipe from one of the Moosewood cookbooks (I think, or maybe Molly Katzen), but it’s been changed a small amount.

Proof a package of yeast (or 2¼ teaspoons) in a ¼ cup of warm water. In the meantime, combine

• ⅔ cup scalded milk
• 1½ cup cooked and puréed squash. (Canned pumpkin works well.)
• ⅓ cup packed brown sugar
• ½ teaspoon salt
• ⅓ cup melted butter
• 1½ teaspoon pumpkin pie spice (don’t use too much — you don’t want it to taste like pie, you just want a bit of spice)

Once this mixture has cooled a bit (from the hot milk and butter), mix in the yeast goo together with 2 cups of flour. Beat well.

Keep mixing and adding flour (2-3 cups) until the dough becomes stiff enough to knead. Turn the dough out onto a floured surface and knead well, adding flour to keep it from sticking (could be a cup more!).

This dough takes a prodigious amount of flour, because it is soft and sticky for a very long time. I usually get scared of overworking or overflouring it and stop when the surface seems to hold together enough to put it in a bowl, even if the guts of it remain somewhat sticky and gooey.

Place the dough in a large buttered bowl, and turn the dough to coat it with butter. Cover and let rise until doubled (about an hour). Punch it down and shape into smallish balls (say about the size of a clementine) and place them (with a couple of inches of space around them) on a baking sheet (or two). Cover with a towel and let rise until doubled, about 30-45 minutes.

Bake the rolls in a preheated 400°F oven for 20-22 minutes (be careful not to over brown them). Brush the tops with melted butter after removing them from the oven.

For our most recent batch, I used some butternut squash that had been oven-roasted and not particularly well puréed. The rolls had little flecks of squash bits that were not objectionable at all.

The other thing I did differently from the recipe is I put the mixed dough in the refrigerator over night, and then in the morning I formed (cold out of the refrigerator) and baked the rolls (allowing an hour for 2nd rising). I don’t know if it was the “first batch” or the roasted squash or the long rising, but I think these squash rolls are the best I’ve made. I’m sorry they’re almost all gone.

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Recently my MacBook speakers decided to stop working properly. I had been using headphones in a café, and when I unplugged them I no longer had sound from my speakers and I couldn’t use the volume/mute buttons on the keyboard. This is a known (and seemingly common) problem, which can sometimes be fixed by jiggling the input port with the headphone jack (or a toothpick). I had fixed it once this way, and avoided using my headphones as much as possible, but sometimes….

Anyway, the sound output system crapped out again, where no amount of jiggling on my part would set it right. After a week without sound I took it into the local Apple store to see if they had some sort of magic tool to jiggle that port.

“Nope. We have to replace the logic board. It’ll be 3 to 5 days.” Crap. Ok, I know if I call AppleCare they’ll send a box and it’ll be gone 3-5 days, so I may as well just leave it. I’d backed up just in case, so I wasn’t at risk of losing any data.

Six(!) days later I finally get the call that my computer is ready. I was impatient and called on Day 4, so they must’ve sent me to the bottom of the queue. When I picked it up, I asked the “concierge” (read that as “the person who points things out to you”) if there would be any problems with Time Machine or other stuff because of the change in MAC address. She said I shouldn’t have *any* Mac problems, bless her heart.

In case you didn’t see where this was going, she was wrong.

In OS X terms, a new logic board = a new computer. Therefore iTunes thinks you’re using a new computer and you must authorize it for iPod Touch applications, music, movies, etc., whatever you get from the iTunes Store. If you failed to deauthorize the computer before you took it in (as I did) you will use up one of your five auths. There is no way to deauthorize just one computer without being at that computer — you have to use up all of your authorizations and then kill them all at once to start over again (limited to once per year, so if you’ve had a bad computer year, you are sunk). The iTunes thing is annoying, but it’s of small issue compared to Time Machine.

With a new logic board (but all of the same old other hardware) Time Machine thinks it’s got a new machine to backup, and instead of using the old image it starts a new one from scratch. Depending on the size of your backup drive, and the number of other users, this could be a serious loss of drive space, let alone your inability to use the fun Time Machine screen to get to your old files. Assuming you haven’t changed the name of your computer, you’ll still have access to the files, but in the much more mundane way of mounting the sparsebundle and then looking for the file you want.

With some hints at macosxhints.com (and a few typo fixes), I managed to get Time Machine working with my original backup, so I can still fly back to April and see what I was working on…

Here’s (roughly) how to do it:

Note your old and new MAC addresses (AKA Ethernet IDs). You can get the new one from your Network Settings (System Preferenes > Network > (click the Advanced button) > Ethernet — It’s called “Ethernet ID”). The old one is part of the “sparsebundle” that is currently on your backup drive, between the underscore and the dot.

Turn off Time Machine, and mount the drive where your backups are stored.

In the commands below, you’ll have to replace the OLD and NEW MAC addresses and Time Machine file names, as well as your computer’s name and your backup drive’s name.

(Line 2 gets the NEW MAC address, including colons, lines 5 and 6 use the new then the old ones run together without colons.)

Open up Terminal and run each command one at a time. I found it easiest to copy the lines to a text file, replace all of the parameters to my particulars, and then copy/paste each line into Terminal.

Example:

OLD Time Machine file: MacName_00f9e8d7c6b5 OLD MAC address: 00:f9:e8:d7:c6:b5 Smushed: 001a2b3c4f56
NEW Time Machine file: MacName_001a2b3c4f56 NEW MAC address: 00:1a:2b:3c:4f:56 Smushed: 00f9e8d7c6b5
Computer Name: MacName
Backup Drive Name: BackupVolumeName

sudo fsaclctl -p /Volumes/Backup\ of\ MacName -d
sudo xattr -w com.apple.backupd.BackupMachineAddress 00:1a:2b:3c:4f:56 /Volumes/Backup\ of\ MacName/Backups.backupdb/MacName
sudo fsaclctl -p /Volumes/Backup\ of\ MacName -e
cd /Volumes/BackupVolumeName
sudo mv .00f9e8d7c6b5 .001a2b3c4f56
sudo mv MacName_00f9e8d7c6b5.sparsebundle MacName_001a2b3c4f56.sparsebundle

I won’t even begin to pretend I know what’s going on. Suffice it to say that it seems to have worked for me. I hope it can help someone else, otherwise, I’ll at least have this online so I can find it next time.

p.s. Adobe CS2 (Photoshop, in particular) needed to be reactivated, too.

p.p.s. The logic board they gave me didn’t have the firmware update from April. Shame.