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the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Toronto, 2011.03.09

I use a Mac at home (and desperately wish I could use one at work). Much though I enjoy having a UNIX system, it's got some glitches.

Take the handling of removable optical media. For the life of me, I can't figure out how it can be possible that the Mac systems are still susceptible to problems with ejecting media.

Today I was trying to copy a .mov file onto a CD for our neighbours. It turned out that the file was too large to fit on a CD, so I tried a DVD. Which resulted in about ten minutes of struggling with getting the blank DVD recognized, then trying to get it out, then trying to get the system from behaving very sluggishly. I had a look at this hilarious advice, and this voodoo and this comprehensive list of things to try.

In the end I had to resort to opening a terminal and angrily punching in 'sudo shutdown -r now'.

Why is this still an issue fer Pete's sake. Twenty years ago it was amusing to have to use a paperclip to get your floppy disks back, but this is just dumb. It's like an embarrassing story that's been lingering for so long that it's taken on a kind of painful dimension.

rand()m quote

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

—Leonardo Da Vinci