As I am eagerly awaiting my replacement mac from Apple, I dont have any computer. So the blog is kinda put on hold untill I can put my unbox post up here

What do you do on a hung over Saturday with no will to go outside ( ok I had to go get food, but that does not count ) , and no Mac to surf on? Easy, hook up your 5 year old desktop ( with an astonishing 256mb ram ) to the tv, and beg to the net gods that you find something enjoyable to stream. South park is blocked in Sweden, but I found family guy to stream. That was 5 hours ago. Gotto surf some more on the iPhone, which I btw wrote this post on! Surfed like crazy for a week, but still I have only consumed about 200mb, which leaves me with 9.8gb left on my monthly plan ,)

There was an election, some blue dudes lost, and a red coalition won. You can hear the Americans yell: COMMUNISM!

Jokes aside, yesterday was a very important election. We were going to elect a new government in Norway, and to see if (for the first time in ages a sitting majority government) if [they] would be re-elected. I of course voted my mail to my local embassy here in Stockholm, you know voting is your civil duty!

In Norway I probably wouldn’t had cared less, but when you are in a foreign country you kinda feel more patriotic. So myself and another Norwegian buddy followed the election on Norwegian TV, from start till midnight. I had to run to make the boat, then I made the mistake of watching the election post-coverage until around 2-3 am..

Dead tired, but luckily we kept the (*!!##) party out of office.

Again with the Sundays… Probably the most boring day of the week, you kind of like it anyway since you have the day off. I have spent my day in the most productive matter possible. Got up at 08, ate breakfast at the tvärrbanan train from Alvik to Luma, spent 3 hours thinking what to do, won some money betting on Aston Villa, put it all in Lotto, had a friend over for coffee, watched Fulham-Everton, won some money betting on Fulham, put it all in Lotto again, warmed some leftovers from yesterday, went and saw Brüno…

Hmm.. I realize I probably could have had a more productive day as:

- the apartment really needs to be vacuumed
- the floor wouldn’t cry if I mopped it
- clothes kinda everywhere
- the dishes needs to be done

Then again I would have missed out on my adventure in Alvik

On the bright side, I got my iPhone 3GS, on the down side, I can’t sync it or add music as my computer is in the freakin repair shop yet. Oh well, lets keep on playing Sheep.

I was taking the tube home from work today, and as always it was crowded as hell! I took refuge and crawled in a corner by a pair of doors. You just kind of drift of when taking the subway, hear a sound, next stop blabla, then you realize its your stop. A station before I was getting off I was reading the warning sign beside the emergency door opener, and I couldn’t take my eyes from it. Didn’t seem right, something was off. Then I noticed:

“Brake the glass” ?? I laughed for myself… Hey SL (.se), hire a spell checker!

Indeed, I take it all back.. Shame on me.. That is what you get.. The great spirit of the Mac has punished me.. I spoke ill of the holy product.. Forgive me.. Snow Leopard is awesome.. I mean it.. Really! here’s why:

So I wrote this long post about hos Snow Leopard fucked up my Mac big time, but after a couple of days on Leopard; My computer starting acting up again! Same symptoms! Same freezes! Same kernel panics! I thought about the RAM and started to think up a post about biting the apple (pun intended) and replacing my RAM when I thought about something else.

The Mac was by now so fucked that it refused to boot, even though I had just reinstalled a clean copy of the OS. So, installing works, harddrive works, RAM seems to work. I tried to boot in verbose mode, in single user mode, in safe mode, all kernel panics. Then it hit me, the install DVD contains the Apple Hardware Test app. I popped it in (and the DVD drive worked for a change) and run the test, many times. And of course, there it was:

4VDC/1/40000003:Videocontroller

The freakin NVIDIA GPU had died! Thanx goodbye, hejdå, hade bra! Panic hit me as I really cannot afford a new $2500 laptop atm. So what to do? I could always claim home insurance, but I dont know how much I can get for a 2 year old laptop. I consider it my last option.

Googling the error code I saw that this was a known error. NVIDIA chips are failing like crazy, and it is my model, the 8600GT that is affected! So I went to the local Apple center and left my Macbook Pro with them. They will now look at it and see if this is covered by the Apple extended warranty (my Macbook is out of warranty). After a bit of researching, and a bit of calming down, I know see that they have to fix it for free. Or else I will just slam norwegian consumer law at them, which says the computer MUST work for 5 years. Yay! Now how will I survive a week or two w/out my Mac, using this crappy work HP.

After spending time in hot climate, getting used to sunbathing, snorkeling and 26c plus all the time, I had to get sick when I got home. It started with a sore throat, and escalated into muscle and body pains the day after. Thinking I had only been affected by AC I continued to enjoy the last days of vacation and stayed at home. Then on the third day it hit me! Fever broke out like crazy and I was probably close to 39-40 in body temperature. Boom! Took me hours to get out of bed, spent an hour in the shower trying to get warm, and ate paracetamol like crazy. It was pretty bad, it even felt like the paracetamols didnt help as I was freezing to death (but still hot as an oven). Thinking I need to go to the doctor I consulted the medical people at Vårdguiden. They are saying to call them first since the new influenza craze is raving in the media.

Sure enough I was experiencing every symptom, and my description og the last 4 days fit perfectly. “You probably have the new influenza” was the answer I got. However, since they want to prevent spread, I was banned from going to the doctor, and was refused to test myself everywhere I called. You have it, now stay at home. Kinda weird that you cannot test yourself to check, but apparently they only check people in risk groups. I was told to stay at home for a week, and contact them again if I got any worse. By now, day 5, the fever had gone down to around 38ich so I was not feeling as sick as I was during the weekend. And since all the people who die, experience rapid “worsening” of the illness during day 5-6 I was told to contact an ambulance if needed. I, on the other hand, was only getting better. So by day 7, and after 5 days with fever, I could pronounce myself fever-free. After this, only coughing, muscle pains etc remained, and I was pretty much healthy by the next weekend. I still cough a bit, but I feel fine else.

That is what swineflu felt like, and I have to say. The last time I was sick, with sinus infection, I was 10 times worse. Don’t believe the media hype, you will definitely survive it no problems what so ever. If you should worry about something, it is forced vaccination with a vaccine being tested on YOU as you take it. Different kinds of adjuvant is being used to boost the vaccine, and if you ask me, they are just using the public as a gigantic test ground. A lab-like “new” influenza hits the world , and in record time the medical corporations have a “new” vaccine ready, while governments are preparing to force vaccinate everybody. Sounds fishy if you ask me…

Flying back to sthlm after my vacation was a bumpy ride.. Usually when flying in 35000 feet you have clear skies, making me sit by the window watching the “soft” cloud ceiling a couple of thousand feet below the plane. This time though, we suddenly hit a wall of clouds, and turbulence. Didn’t make much of it, but when the plane flew out of the clouds you could see lightning going off like crazy further down in the clouds. Couldn’t get a good shot, but you can see the residual light in the cloud from lightning.

So I got myself Snow Leopard, the day it came out, weeee and all that. Now after 4 reinstalls, lost backups, and allot of wasted time I am back on 10.5 Leopard. So what happened?

- DVD drive has died, kinda. I could not install via the DVD as it would not mount the disk. I could however manage to restore back to Tiger!! via the original discs that came with the Mac. I had to clone the dvd onto a USB stick I got, which did not work either due to a timeout. Crappy cheap USB memory. Then I formatted my external drive that feeds the Xbox with stuff, and cloned the install DVD onto that. Worked like a charm!

I was on Snow Leopard, enjoying the changes and feeling good about my Mac now feeling even snappier, even though it is over two years old. I installed all the stuff you need, set up all the nice addons you kinda gets used to and started using it. Didn’t feel much “newer” than Leopard, but I knew that all the good changes is under the hood. 64bit apps and all that. Then it started happening…

- Kernel Panics (I presume) as the system would just hang for no apparent reason. I had to hold down the power button and then restart again. Crap I thought. Then after a few hours the same again. No apparent reason. I was watching a DVD, after a clean reboot no apps started, and it crashed. Rebooted again and watched the same movie, no issues what so ever.

- After around two days with these hang ups, it just refused to start. Booting into Mac OS X triggered a kernel panic even before hitting the UI, with the nice message “You need to restart your computer”. What good is that if it keeps saying it on every boot.

I reinstalled the OS on top of the old one, to preserve all my apps and settings, docs etc. It worked fine for a couple of days, until it started again, the same procedure. A couple of days with kernel panics, and then dead, completely dead.

After a couple of re installs I have given up. Snow Leopard can kiss my ass, I am back on Leopard, where everything is working like a charm. I can hear the fanboys screaming faulty RAM, faulty Drive, Faulty bla bla, but in the end, turns out Leopard “purrs” smoother than the new variant. I am waiting for 10.7.

How one man got infected
How one man survived
How one man stood up against the medical industry
How one man refused to DIE

coming soon..