"We drive a stake through it."

My 320 GB LaCie external hard drive, which served me faithfully for five years, failed to mount last week. This could have been because it accidentally fell on my hardwood floor, although I’m not ruling out an act of suicide over being upstaged by my new 1TB LaCie hard drive.

I brought it to Tekserve to find out if there was anything that could be done. Diagnosis: Sorry, it’s trashed.

“So do I bring it somewhere to be recycled or something?”

“Actually, we can dispose of it for you right here.”

“How do I make sure that nobody can retrieve what’s on the hard drive?”

“We take the drive out of the case and put a stake through it.” And he wasn’t kidding; it’s actually what they do. And then they sell the case as scrap.

The tech brought me a release to sign. I felt like I was putting an old sick pet to sleep. Fortunately, I had backed up all the info on the drive just before it (literally) crashed, or there would have been a data recovery fee of up to $800.

I’m treating the new one with kid gloves now, continuing to back up regularly, managing the octopus of cables so it doesn’t accidentally get dragged off the desk, and being on the lookout for hard drive suicide notes.

I’m in the middle of a project that involves audio and video files, which eat hard drive space voraciously. I’ve been looking into how to upgrade the internal hard drive. Based on what I’ve read, my Intel iMac is held together by a bunch of magnets that a normal person will never be able to put back together properly again.

A techie friend said, “Oh, it’s simple. You just remove the bezel.” I replied that it wasn’t so simple for me, although “bezel” is a funny word.

I went for an external hard drive instead. My 300 GB LaCie 2d Quadra’s been running faithfully for over four years, so I feel confident about the brand, even though I still don’t know if it’s pronounced “Lacey” or “La See.” J&R and B&H both carry the 1 TB drive for $150, which is the cheapest you’ll find anywhere. J&R had a coupon on their site for $15.00 off a purchase of $150 or more.

Once I got there and was in a mild trance staring at an array of RAID arrays, the clerk told me I couldn’t use the coupon on the hard drive because it wasn’t good on sale items. Just about everything this weekend is a sale item there, so I went ahead and bought it anyway.

“So, Miss Spendthrift,” said my Inner Parents, “you don’t know where your next paycheck is coming from and you’re buying more equipment? You might as well get the two terabyte drive.” This is how I know it’s my Inner Parents speaking. My actual parents wouldn’t know a terabyte if it bit them.

I explained to them that while a 1 TB drive would be a good investment, the 2 TB would be overkill right now. By the time I need the 2 TB drive, it’ll be time for a totally new iMac that will have a 10 TB internal drive and make toast.

So now I’ve got both drives connected and I’m nervous about putting stuff on the new one, afraid I’ve jinxed my equipment by recommending it. I keep checking them to see if they’re running. They are, but as you can see in the photo above, the little blue light is beginning to dim on the old one. I’ll have to find out if you can change the bulb and if it involves magnets or bezels.

The underside of your iMac, with the little panel removed. Photo courtesy Bleedingedge TV.

I needed to upgrade the memory in my iMac from the 1GB that it shipped with in 2007 to 4GB so that I can run Parallels Desktop. This is so I can use MS Office 2007 and the Beta version of Office 2010 in their native habitats, because the Mac version of these apps is like a toy.

I ordered the upgrade from OWC, which has a little video on how to install it, but I was really inspired by this video because they showed what actually happens when you, a real person, upgrade your own memory cards. They’re supposed to pop out of the slots like Pop Tarts out of a toaster, but they don’t. I had to ease the old one out with that most intricate of contemporary instruments, the bent paper clip.

Also, I thought I was pushing the new ones in too hard, so I didn’t push: I didn’t want to ram the RAM. So when I plugged the computer back in and turned it on, instead of the familiar Bwwwoongggggg! I got “boop boop boop…boop boop boop…” So I pressed them in harder than I’d thought I was supposed to, turned it on again, and got the familiar start-up sound.

And there you have it:

"Nom-nom-nom!"

Now I’m going to look for a hard drive upgrade. What part of the iMac do you unscrew for that, and what sound does it make when you’re doing it wrong?

Like minnows through my brain.

I had an interview today at a temp agency that supplies graphics people to large multinational corporations. I took a PowerPoint test and finished the one-hour test in forty minutes, doing stuff most people would never do to PowerPoint: Standardizing chart formats, matching RGB colors and typesetting away like Robo-Gutenberg. And then I spent the next twenty minutes on one thing, which was how to start numbering pages from “1″ starting on the page after the cover page.

I looked under every menu and sub-menu for the magic formula, clicking headers, footers, options and tools until the timer dinged. I asked the guy in charge of the test room, “How do you make the page after the cover page be 1?” And he answered:

“You number the cover page zero.”

All right…it’s not like there’s actual multinational corporate work flying around out there.

My badge is tired, and so am I.

WordPress, the blogging/content management software with which you’re viewing this blog unless I change my mind, had a big convention on November 14th and 15th at Baruch College’s Vertical Building. The people who designed the Vertical Building were very thoughtful. They knew that bloggers sit at a desk so much of the time and rarely get enough exercise, so they built elevators that only go to the third, fifth and eleventh floors and the escalators weren’t working that weekend at all. And since events were taking place on several different floors, often within minutes of each other, we had plenty of opportunity to move.

But even though the building had a learning curve, attendees were enthusiastic about pursuing more info on our favorite tracks. Mine were “Blogger” and “Beginning Developer” and I zoned in on everything about Themes, including:

• Daisy Olsen and Adria Richards, who were informative and proved that I’m not the only woman who likes to make a cartoon of herself.
• Allan Cole, who had a funny presentation on Parent/Child Themes, something I didn’t even know about and one that may ultimately solve my “customization” issues: The parent theme gives you the framework and the PHP code, and then you adapt the CSS to your own nefarious ends. (This is, of course, dependent on my having the patience to figure out CSS to begin with.)
• Jim Doran, who does the websites for Johns Hopkins, and showed us how to make Javascript easy with jQuery, and answered the question “Oh, so that’s what happened with Javascript since the last time I learned it and never used it.”

Towards the end of Day Two I was saying to myself, “Okay, enough with the theming; six months from now you’ll be kicking yourself for not having sat in on some of these other great topics.” So I went to a presentation on podcasting and when I got there, the guy was talking about theming.

The conference finished in the auditorium, so we didn’t have to run from place to place but I think that’s where I picked up a bad cold despite copious applications of free hand sanitizer, courtesy of Microsoft.

Some random stuff:

• The winner of a plug-in contest was “Conversation Prompter,” which “allows you to prompt your readers to comment by asking them to answer a question specific to that post;”
• There’s a WYSIWYG application called “Elastic” being developed that will make designing WordPress themes even more like using Dreamweaver;
• The guys at the Genius Bar showed me that I was smarter than I’d thought, or at least they ran through the same steps that I had when troubleshooting my problem;
• There was free cheese.

And I enjoyed Erin Blaskie‘s “Lifestreaming” presentation. The name makes it sound like the latest in New Age self-help, but it’s really just having this “You Central” that unites your blog, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and videos in one place. It’s a narcissist’s dream, and my New Year’s Resolution for 2010.

Now that the blog is up and running, I have a few ideas for making it look better.

First off, I’d like the banner to go straight across the top of the page, with a 3-pixel rule across the top and the bottom. Then, I’d like to pick a different blue, somewhere between a sky-blue and a robins-egg blue. And then I’d like to employ the “Bevel and Emboss” feature in Photoshop so that the banner stands out in a sort of mock 3D. And then I think I’d like to drop-shadow the sidebar, and put a margin on either side of the content so that it’s centered between the left of the screen and the sidebar.

Oh yeah, and fix the code so that the comments show up. But that part is no fun.

Sometimes it’s as simple as that.

My code has gone Perquackey

When you download a WordPress theme and open it up, there’s this stuff that explodes in your face and kills you. No, wait…that’s the inside of a golf ball.

What’s inside a WordPress theme is a bunch of little files with the extension .php, except for a file that says “styles.css” and which, if you have any version of Dreamweaver installed on your computer whatsoever, will automatically launch it whether you want it to or not.

The “.php” is what makes a blog a blog and not a static Web site. It’s an interactive scripting language. I have a nodding familiarity with HTML and CSS, having designed sites before, but as far as my knowledge of PHP, I feel like I’m reading Martian folk songs.

In order to get the site up and running with at least a scintilla of that “Personal Branding” that’s so important today, I figured there are two things I basically know how to do:

1. Change the header picture in the default theme to my banner, and
2. Tweak the colors through the CSS file to match the blue of my logo.

These things being done, I now have lovely blue headings and half-a-head, which is better than none. Firefox, my fave-rave browser, has a plug-in called Firebug that opens a little window at the bottom of your screen and lets you take a look at the code for that site. This is great if you want to see how somebody built something and you want to…uh…borrow their code, which will inevitably be a Flash file and won’t show anything.

What Firebug is showing me on my site is some code I didn’t write and didn’t remember seeing in any of the little files. For example, the #header has a bunch of lines that start with “Moz,” which I see stands for Mozilla, and it also says:

background: transparent url(Images/banner2.gif) no-repeat scroll center bottom

And what I’d written was:

background: url(‘Images/banner2.gif’) no-repeat bottom center

So, does WordPress rewrite your code? Why would it do that? Or is this a thing that this particular browser does, the way older versions of IE have those weird exceptions?

Another thing is that I have a ghosted “Desktop Icon” at the upper-left-hand corner next to my banner. I selected it and chose “Inspect Element” and saw this in the Firebug screen, under the HTML tab:

<a href=”http://melindabrunonyc.com/“>Desktop Icon</a>

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that this is something that WordPress sticks in there to automatically pull in the name of whatever you’re calling your blog, plus give you a link back to the main page of the blog.

I’ve been asking around if anyone can figure anything out, but most people I know who build Web sites aren’t familiar with PHP and then they look at me like I’m singing Martian folk songs. Besides, I don’t think it’s in the PHP. I think I’m missing something in the CSS that’s overriding what I’ve put there, or missing a piece of CSS code somewhere. Hey, I’m perfect, but it happens.

So I’m putting out there for your feedback: Put on your magic Firebug glasses and take a look. It’s probably something forehead-smackingly simple, except if it’s not.

I switched from Blogger to WordPress because being a graphic designer with a Blogger blog is like trying to show you’re Ansel Adams with a point-and-shoot camera. WordPress will let you create your own custom themes…if you know how.

There are a lot of great online tutorials, but what I really miss is having face-to-face, “Help, come here and tell me what I did wrong!” instruction. Then somebody can tell me why my custom-made banner isn’t showing up in my header, and sometimes my header isn’t showing up at all.

Perhaps I can scrounge up some help at WordCampNYC 2009:

I’ll start sewing my name tags on the collar of my site now. Hey, that’s one way to identify a headerless blog!