On globetrotting

I don’t know how Mike does it, or any of the executives that I know. Travelling across the world on a plane, even in business class just ruins the body. I suppose you get use to it after a time.

Anyways, I had the opportunity to travel to Paris (with about 24-hours notice), France to present the Kobo Touch and be judged for the prestigious Janus de L’industrie award at the Instutut Français du Design.

This is the first award nomination for the Kobo Touch. It kind of validates our approach at building “frictionless technology” and my personal goal at making a better book.

I’ll just say that all presentations were suppose to be 20-minutes plus a 10-minute Q & A session.

We were there for 2 hours

I couldn’t have done this myself, I have such an amazing team at Kobo.

How did it end off?

Well, I’m just going to say that I can add “award winning designer” to my CV now.

Idle time on the flight

I really need to install games on the laptop. Sometimes you need a break from writing. I started the migration while on the return flight to Toronto. Figure I could get the lion’s share done.

It occurred to me that the best way to create the markup for the blog was to create a Textpattern template that outputted each post with the right YAML file header. Then I realized that the bulk of my posts are in MovableType! Conversely, all I need to do is fix the hard-links and upload the static files to the site and Bam…old versions available. That’s pretty amazing and probably the fastest way to do that.

This means I only need to move about 30 articles from my Drupal install as well as a few dozen that existed at ttohinteractive.com (That’s a blog I started incognito–I still use the URL, mostly to VNC into my Hackintosh).

One of the things that fascinate me is reading old posts that I used to write. I’m amazed with the openness that I used to write with. Right now, everything is a bit start-and-stop. I certainly don’t feel like things are flowing out of me, but I suppose it is just about practice. The former GM always said that, “Practice is the heart of excellence.”

Poor Hackintosh

I’ve been trying to diagnose the constant kernel panicking on the Hackintosh. I installed Lion on it 2-3 months ago and it was running great. I even managed to install the 10.7.2 update without a hitch. Then about 3 weeks the machine started kernel panicking all the time.

Is it the Hardware?

I immediately suspected the overclock (from 2.8 GHz to 3.4 GHz) was the problem, but putting the machine back to its original defaults did not help. I then turned my attention to the RAM, but testing using memtest86 seems to indicate that the ram and the bus seem to be in good shape. I’ve moved most of my data to other drive, so should protect a harddrive crash.

Is it Software?

I’ve been troubleshooting for about 2 weeks and I’ve just about given up and am considering doing a full-reinstall. That sounds unreasonable, I’m sure, but in the realm of reality when you’re dealing with Hackintoshes.

I certainly hope it fixes it.