Hi Mike,

Just to disabuse you of the idea that I haven’t been working
on the latest mountain E-pic….

A tale of OS woes

I’ve been trying to get all of my recent mountain pictures onto my Mac mini with limited success. Previouly I had found that a direct camera-to-mini transfer wasn’t working, and I also had had problems with reading my flash drives with the mini. Then yesterday I had the bright idea that I’d make a CD of the pictures I had previously transferred to my MS laptop, and use that to transfer them to my wonderful Mac mini.But what a can of worms I opened up.

First, let me give (as much as I hate to) an A+ to Microsoft for making camera-to-PC transfers easy. But wait just a minute, Microsoft, don’t get smug, that grade is about to be counterbalanced!) After looking at a couple of slideshows on the laptop PC, I convinced myself that all the pictures were readable and proceeded to make a CD of them. That seemed to go well–I could view all the CD pictures on the laptop, so I pulled out the CD and stuck it into my Linux desktop machine.

Uh Oh. Only about 10% of the pictures were readable there, even with my bullet-proof old workhorse, never-fail, Linux/Unix “xv”. So back to Microsloth laptop. Figuring that the CD-R disk must have been bad, I made another CD. Reading the new CD on the same machine suddenly led to an application crash. Up pops a text advisory” “Please tell Microsoft about this driver crash”. I passed on the info, so they can add it to their database/blackhole. Microsoft gets an F for that, averaging to a C.

Despite the crash, testing the new CD on my Linux desktop surprisingly produced slightly better results–I could read more of the CD pictures than before. (Linux’s grade is indeterminate. Maybe
both CDs were bad.) I set the CDs aside for later when I could put them into the Mac mini.

Back at home that night I put one of the CDs into my Macmini. After a colorful wheel spun on the screen, up popped a CD icon. I clicked on the icon, set the View option to thumbnails and perused the 208 pictures. Apparently about a dozen of them were unreadable, as indicated by the text window that popped up when I clicked some of the icons. Well, at least there were 196 good ones, so I’ll give Apple a provisional “A”.

To save the picture files to the machine, I dragged and dropped the CD icon into a new folder on the desktop. After the transfer, I opened up the new folder, and “whammo!”, the folder vanished from the screen, with a text message saying, “Folder application crashed irretreviably. OS X still operational.” Yes, the desktop was still running, but my new folder was gone to the bit bucket in the sky. Apple gets a provisional “F” for that. The CD icon was there, so I opened it, created a new desktop folder, and hand dragged-and-dropped 196 thumbnails into it from the CD folder. The new folder was fine, and I did a bunch of editing in it. So let’s erase the provisional “F” from Apple’s report card and transfer it to Microsoft for making such a cruddy CD. Perhaps Apple should get an “A” for being able to read it at all.

However, that’s not the end of the story. To eject the CD, I dragged the CD icon to the Trash folder, and the word “eject” appeared over it, but the CD didn’t move out of its slot. I tried right-clicking on the CD and selecting “eject” from the menu, but nothing happened. It was getting late, so I shut the mini down. What grade should Apple get for that?”F-“? A bad CD can’t be ejected? Maybe the problem will fix itself when I turn the mini back on tonight? Stay tuned.

rakkity