I have a Seagate 250GB drive that I was using for Time Machine. Locally it was great Then Apple updated the AIR port base station. SWEET.

I've got two macs, a MBP and a MBA. The MBA uses a smaller 40gb drive hung off the Airport station, and backs up like a champ. I've got history back several weeks at any given time.

The MacBook Pro however has had zero luck! First I wasn't able to get the initial 126gb back up to complete. I read an article about starting the back up on the network, then completing it over USB to speed it up. Then reconnect to the network for all future backing up. NO LUCK.

Then I gave it a night to do a full back up over the wire, this morning it looked good. A few smaller back ups took place through out the morning.

I enter time machine, and all that is there is "now" no other days or anything. Not sure what I'm doing wrong. The MBA runs hourly, does it's thing and is done, but the MBP just won't get a good back up going. I'd rather not have to always think about ejecting a USB ext disk but may have to. WEAK

Without even knowing it, prior to our meeting, she bought a widescreen, HD capable TV.

Tom and I bought a PS3 for 360|Flex Atlanta, since he's already equipped for gaming, and Blue Ray, I got this one. Not counting when it's doing a tour  of duty as the official Rock Band/Guitar Hero station for 360|Flex, it's now our Blue Ray player. I doubt I'll ever own or play a PS3 game, since my gaming days ended when the Original NES died... Good times, good times.

I was pleasantly surprised (I was fully thinking that we'd be buying a new TV sooner than planned to handle HD content) when I upgraded the PS3's OS to support the BD/BlueTooth remote control, and it comes up with "HDMI Device Detected. Use it?"

"Oh hellz yeah!"

I watched a few minutes of Spider-Man 3 (came with the system), and then Transformers, and WOWZA! While I don't think the world changed, or that I'll never watch non 1080 content again, I will say that DAMN it does look great!

I still wouldn't buy one with my own money. It's just too specialized.

Tom and I ordered them for using at the conferences. We typically use our personal machines, which is great, but mine is a MBP, and his is some kind of 12 ton windoze thing, neither are light by any means.

So this way we can carry a little less weight for checking people in, looking things up, doing keynotes, etc.

The other upside, for me is travel. My wife and I are staying in Italy a week beyond 360|Flex Europe and blogging and surfing the web will be much nicer without a 3 or 4 lb MBP. I'll be in Japan in May, again, a lighter machine will rock.

Plus, my MBP is my dev machine, it's much more important and when I travel I sometimes worry about it, losing it or being damaged, would really impact my work.

So my thoughts...

it's nice. it's too small to work on all day, but as a second machine, it's pretty nice. I won't say how light it is, because I knew it was light, and those reviewers who repeat the obvious are kinda lame. Battery run time, easy to argue, weight, kinda hard, I figured Steve wasn't fudging.

Combined with .mac I think it really comes into it's own as a second machine. I moved all my conference stuff to .mac and created aliases in my regular docs folders. I have my iDisk available offline so the files are always there. So far it's pretty smooth. I like it.

I definitely doesn't feel powerful enough to do development, and the Hard drive (we opted for SSD) is WAY too small for that. My MBP has my code, CF and Flex, my iTunes library, my iPhoto library (not really that big), and gb's and gb's of other data, no way 64gb, or even 80, could handle it.

The battery seems ok, I've yet to run it down. The power adapter is pretty whack. It's yet another brick to carry (should I take both machines) and it seems like the plug could easily have been a flat spot in the body to accommodate a standard mag safe plug, but this way consumers have to buy additional plugs, more $.

The fancy multi-touch trackpad.... haven't used it. Firefox doesn't recognize it (obviously) and I can't fit my photos on it, and using it in the Finder, just makes my icons all the wrong size. So I'm not too bummed my MBP doesn't have that feature.

It does boot fast, i'll give it that.

My final verdict (for now at least) it's a good second laptop for travel (we should all be so lucky to have that kind of coin) and presentations, it's no way a primary developer laptop. It may very well work ok for someone who doesn't compile code, or run photoshop often. We're leasing these two, so we can have some write offs for 360Conferences, plus if they suck, we'll buy them for the 1$ fee (cuz we're paying so bloody much) and use them as conference terminals for whatever.

So I zipped up some old 360|Flex folders; Atlanta, Seattle, and San Jose 1, and stuff to make some room. So far so good, I could just keep the archive file in the business folder and get in it, if I need it.

Enter the MacBook AIR (More on that next), so I figure I'll unarchive and copy those up to .mac that way I could have alias's on each machine to have nice access to the data.

Enter the error!

the archive was a monster, 1.24gb, so after a minute or so of processing, OSX tells me that it can't unarchive, error -1 not enough permissions.

Ah hell.

I rebuilt permissions, renamed the file, tried the command line unzip and zip tools, no dice...

The final solution, changing the extension to .rar That seemed to please the unarchiver, go figure.

I know I'm happy.

I never need Acrobat pro. I use preview on the Mac for my basic PDF reading, it's lighter, so it's a no-brainer.

HOWEVER

today I had to review 20 PDFs, and make notes on them and even put some text in them so that I could send them off for review.

After suffering through so many stupid Adobe Updater times, when it brings my machine to a screaching high temp halt, Acrobat pro is broke.

WHAT?

I click a PDF to open in Acrobat and get this...

I've done nothing to or in acrobat, ever.

It's been updated plenty since I installed CS3, about every three weeks it seems, i have to go make a sandwhich while the stupid updater runs.

And after all that suffering, after giving up productive cycles.... I get this...

Weak sauce!!!!

Of course I get it while I'm in San Francisco for the week, so I don't have my install DVDs..

Packing can be so stressful. I always worry I'll run out of underwear!

I'm getting read to head to SFO for Adobe's Industry Leader and Creative Media Summit. I'm not entirely sure what it means, but sounds fun nonetheless.

It should be exciting, maybe rubbing elbows whomever Adobe thinks is an industry leader :)

My main hope is that it will afford Tom and I a chance to get 360Conferences' name out there a bit more, we're more than 360|Flex (big news on that coming soon, I hope), so we want people to know who we are.

If you're gonna be in attendance, drop a comment or an email and let me know, we can get drinks or something!

The news this week is that Lynda.com, long time organizer of Flash Forward, has handed over (sold? How much?) ownership to Metalliq, a design shop big in Flash, Flex, Silverlight, etc. (I'll admit I know very little beyond what the site says and what I've heard about Metalliq)

I'm not really that surprised, Flash Forward probably needed some new blood, and after DX3's implosion, I'm thinking Lynda lost some cred, which probably had an impact on Flash Forward. Will the price change? Will FF ever go back to Boston? Or leave San Francisco in general, now that it's in its owners' back yard?

While everyone praises Lynda for giving up the reigns, and sings Metalliq's praises for breathing new life into Flash Forward, I wonder...

Will Flash Forward have a different feel being owned and run by a design firm? Will other design firms want to participate now that one of their competitors runs the show? Will the event be heavily branded as "A Metalliq" event?

I know Tom and I have seen issues arise when one firm is a higher level sponsor than their competitors, when one firm gets an email blast to all attendees, to effectively solicit new hires... I can only image how Metalliq's competitors will see Flash Forward from now on.

Time will tell, and I'm very curious to see how things will play out.

Sadly I won't be there to celebrate!

Tom and I tried to figure out how to be in New York tomorrow (my birthday by the way) but it just couldn't be done. between consulting, and my birthday, and 360|Flex Atlanta a little over a week away, it just wasn't in the stars.

Tom and I are rather fanatical about running our business "the Cluetrain way" so the chance to get together with Doc and a bunch of other visionaries was hard to miss. We've heard that they'll be having a similar event or events out west so we'll be makin' sure we're there!

What's really a bummer, Jake McKee is one of those visionaries. Jake wrote blogfusion, which is what I was running johnwilker.com, red-omega, and my wife's blogs on.

If you're around New York tomorrow, register!

Tom is more anti patent than I am, but as more and more whack ass patent trolls surface, I'm quickly rethinking my position to be patently (pun not intended) anti Patent. I think the idea behind patents is a good and noble one, however the patent office seems to be more and more nothing but an enabler for patent trolls. I mean really "A device that plays music"? That's a valid patent? What about “method and system for playing games on a network.”? Really?

My biggest complaint about the patent process is the support of vaporware. I fully believe that any patent not accompanied by a WORKING prototype be thrown out. If you can't build it, you can't patent it.

That last one I cited, is fully real, and fully threatening the likes of CNET, DIGG, Ebaums, etc. Thankfully the EFF has stepped up (courtesy of Mashable) to defend this case as part of their patent busting initiative.

I still thinking protecting IP is important, but I think without serious over haul, the patent office, may be the single biggest contributor to a stifling of innovation. Searching the patent database is like looking for a unicorn in a horse pasture, and since most of the troll patents are so vague, you might not even see them, until you're hit with a lawsuit.

It's time to re-up my EFF membership, I'm thinking it'll be a bit bigger this year to help further this patent busting, show these trolls where the door is.

If this patent non-sense irritates you even a fraction as much as it irritates me, think about joining the EFF, or re-donating if you've donated already.

Google and twitter have teamed up to keep us all up to date on Super Tuesday happenings. Google also has some code to put up a gadget to track. (Below). There's also a cool google map to see what people are saying.

I'm a huge Joel Spolsky fan, and after watching Project Aardvark, I started looking at Copilot.

Since my mom won't buy a Mac, and my sister can't afford one, I've had to help solve the typical PEBKAC malware troubles that plague windoze users of their calibre. CoPilot, rocks, the mac client let's me take control of their machines, and do what I can from CO to WA. Can't beat that.

The fact that the guys came up with it in a summer, was just too cool.

Now... it's free on weekends!

Can't wait to see Copilot 3.0