Shirt Pocket Watch

Yesterday, Ketzl and I took the drive out to Shelburne Falls and visited the nice people at Eddie’s Wheels. And while it was good to say “Hi” to them, the main purpose was to get K’s cart retrofitted.

Her previous cart was a “neutral balance” cart—that is, when she’s in it, her front legs get the weight they’d usually get. But, as the disease has progressed over the winter, her front has become much weaker, and we’ve had to hold the cart’s “yoke”, pulling up to help take weight off. It’s hard to do, and none too comfortable for Ketzl.

The newly retrofitted cart is a fully counterbalanced cart with an “outrigger”—basically, front “training wheels” that let her take even more weight off, and also prevent her from collapsing, something that’s become more frequent. And, as of a few weeks ago, Ketzl started having placement problems with her front left paw—she’ll knuckle, put it down funny… basically, the disease has destroyed sufficient nerve tissue there that she doesn’t quite know where it is.

It was a beautiful day yesterday, sunny and clear. On the way back, driving along Mohawk Trail (Rt 2), I stopped and climbed the “Long View” tower to see what I could see. Rolling hills, roads crisscrossing, river valley, the French King bridge towering over the Connecticut River gorge below. The whole route before me, my next two hours clearly visible in the midday sun.

When I got back in the car and set off, I thought about Degenerative Myelopathy, and how—once diagnosed—the course is similarly visible: a high-level view of weakness, placement issues, paralysis, death. You navigate through it as best you can, take a detour or two along the way, but to get to where you’re going you have to go down the whole road.

Back on Route 2, up to speed after the rotaries and dropped lane diversions, I rolled down the windows. Ketzl’s ears flapped in the breeze and she panted happily. I poked my head out the driver’s side window and breathed in the spring air.

This coming Saturday at 7:30 am on Boston’s Fox 25 (repeating on the 23rd at 8 am), Pet Keeping with Marc Morrone (check your local listings) is doing a piece on animal rehabilitation. I’ve been told that Ketzl is going to be featured during the segment, so—if you’re interesting in this kind of thing, this is the kind of thing you’d be interested in.

I just wanted to give a bit of a Heads-Up to Teh Internets Users who might be relying on the Restore tab of the DVD that came with their Intel Mac.

Unfortunately, the copy of Disk Utility that’s on those DVDs (I’ve checked the one for the MacBook Pro and the iMac, but I don’t have an Intel Mac mini to test with) has a non-functioning Restore tab: the tab relies on drag-and-drop to set the destination volume (if you’re not using an image, the source as well), and—due to what looks to be a bug in this specific version of the utility—drag and drop does not work in the volume sidebar.

This means it’s not possible to restore a volume when booted from this DVD (regardless of how that volume was created). If you’re relying on the DVD’s restore functionality, I suggest installing a minimal system to a small partition on an external drive instead, as the Disk Utility that’s part of Tiger itself works just fine.

But these days, for doing basic backup of my Mac, the single best app is SuperDuper. Their website, their software, the pricing, the overall design philosophy - all of it is perfectly integrated. They are a great little company with a great little product. I hope they do well!

via Troy Angrignon - Adventure Capitalist. Thanks, Troy!

I was reading Wil Shipley’s recent post about his horrible Comcast DVR experience, which has some kind of Microsoft DVR software on it, and it amazed me how lousy it was, compared to my Sony VGX-XL1 Media Center PC.

I know Microsoft is a big company, but it sounds like the DVR division (if, indeed, they provided the software he was using) not only hasn’t talked to the Media Center team, they haven’t even looked at Media Center. Because MCE doesn’t have any of these problems. (Which isn’t to say it’s perfect, but it’s positively shiny in comparison to what Wil describes.)

I’ve been avoiding anything but analog cable because of exactly this kind of issue—I just don’t want to be forced to take Comcast’s lousy box. The Vista version of MCE, with CableCard support, can’t come soon enough.

Well, today—March 16th, 2006—is Ketzl’s 9th birthday.

It’s a milestone I really never thought Ketzl would reach, but I suppose I shouldn’t be so pessimistic: I didn’t think she’d make it through to last spring, nor this calendar year, but she keeps surprising me.

Surprise is one of those things dogs deal with a lot better than we do. Dogs who lose limbs wake from their amputation, try to stand, look mildly surprised and then adjust. Just like that.

When she first got her wheelchair, Ketzl was a little surprised, but delighted that she could walk again, on her own. Seconds later, no surprise at all. It’s just one of those things.

The first time she fell over because her back and front legs were too weak to keep her upright: surprised. Seconds later, she looked at me in a way that clearly said “C’mon, Dave. You saw I was going to fall. Get with it!”

Me, I’m surprised every day I wake and she’s still there with us. But mostly, I’m surprised by how deeply I care.

Hey, very cool—macosxhints has Made SuperDuper! a pick of the week!

I’m usually a bit reluctant to recommend TV Shows, because you never know whether future episodes are going to meet the expectations set up by past ones. But, quite a few in, it really seems like AMC’s Hustle is a winner.

A terrifically fun British import, Hustle tells the story of a team of grifters, and a different con every week. Great cast, direction, writing—lots of fun all around. Check it out!

Shirt Pocket announces the immediate availability of SuperDuper! 2.1, the Intel Mac-compatible Universal version of SuperDuper.

Of course, we haven’t just recompiled for Intel—we’ve added new features, polished existing ones, reworked the documentation—all to improve the popular, Eddy Award winning disk copying utility for Mac OS X.

SuperDuper 2.1 adds all this to the impressive improvements of 2.0, including: the ability to easily schedule backups; additional imaging options; more control over shutdown; better AppleScript support; hundreds of UI improvements; and a completely rewritten, task-based User’s Guide.

SuperDuper 2.1 supports both Intel and Power PC Macs running Mac OS X 10.3.9 or later, and is a free update for existing users. The unregistered version will perform full backups for free. Registration costs $27.95, and includes many additional timesaving features, including Smart Update for faster backups, Scheduling, and others.

More information, as well as a download link, can be found at http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper.

Thanks for waiting, everyone!

As you probably know from a previous post, we’re working on Universal versions of all of Shirt Pocket’s applications, including SuperDuper. (We’re in late-stage testing with SuperDuper, and it should be out reasonably soon.)

One thing we’ve been able to confirm: disk I/O on the Intel Macs is much faster than it is on the Power PC ones—seemingly about twice as fast.

In fact, SuperDuper builds about twice as fast on the MacBook as it does on a dual-2.5Ghz G5 desktop, and that’s primarily I/O related.

Sweet!