New-Age Tech Management Vs. Old World Industrial Management

I was going to actually post this last weekend, but I got sick and didn't quite finish the post... so here's the post mostly as it was, but with a little editing (I'll just leave this post short as it is).

In The April, 2008 issue of Wired Magazine, there was a great write-up in there titled How Apple Got Everything Right By Doing Everything Wrong.

This is mostly an article about the way Apple does business differently than what many of the "New" tech companies believes a company should be managed and operate.

Especially referring to Google's "Don't Be Evil" moto, and the open-source movement's ideologies.

As a side-note... there was also an article (or series of articles) on 9 trends of business that was pretty interesting. I found one of the particular trends rather interesting:

Rise Of The Instapreneur, where all anyone really needs anymore is a great idea or plans / blueprints and someone else will do all the work when / if you make a sale or need merchandise.

(You should be able to find the links to the other 8 trends in the article - which are also fascinating stories)

Click Here To Read The Full Article By Itself.

Brace Yourselves!

Just to give everyone a forewarning and to fend off any of the coming onslaught Keith Karr might have in mind... (that he keeps promising to deliver but hasn't shown anything for yet!)

I'm going to address some of the issues he thinks he might have with my post that I bashed him on his comment about Thursday's most recent DVD/CD release, Kill The House Lights.

Keith really thinks he has a few bones to pick with me in the graveyard that I buried him in! (As well as some other things.)

For some reason Keith is convinced that the first few songs may not be brand-spanking new demos from Thursday but is rather older stuff that Thursday had done... even despite this:

Kill The House Lights

Do you see the line in that promo ad that says "3 brand new songs"?

Yes a lot of the stuff on the CD was older stuff that they threw on there that they thought some of their more devoted fans would be interested in... But The First 3 Songs Are BRAND-SPANKING NEW!

Ok, now that I've got that covered... it's time to blow up at least one of his missiles before he can even launch an attack...

I actually bought my copy of Kill The House Lights from Best Buy, which had 3 Bonus Exclusive Tracks on it...

• Cross Out The Eyes (Live At The Grove)
• Steps Acending (Live At The Grove)
• How Long Is The Night? (Live At The Grove)

When I initially got the CD and told Keith about it I said something like "the extra bonus songs aren't all that great"...

And Keith went off on me for saying that after I wrote up my very positive and optimistic review of Kill The House Lights... and then bashing him on his comment.... calling me stuff similar to a hypocrite and stuff, and unworthy of saying any of the things I did about him.

Well, let's dispose this myth and put it all out in the light!

It is probably still true that I don't think too highly of those extra bonus songs now any much more... and that is for one simple fact...

And that is because Geoff barely sings half of his lines... and I would rather listen to Geoff singing than relying on the crowd to sing the lines in what I'm listening too!

I really like the uniqueness of Geoff's voice and his style of singing, and that can't be matched or beaten by anyone else!

So when it comes down to it I would rather just listen to studio versions than those extra demos... and even more I would rather be at a Thursday concert than listen to any recording!!!

Also another thing I would like to point out that Keith recently told me regarding A City By The Light Divided is that it is wearing on him.

Yes, the more he listens to A City By The Light Divided the more he is liking the album!

And I think that is true anyway, though there were some more songs on there that appealed to me more than him... but it is an album that you have to listen to a little before you can enjoy the subtleness of it.

Though it still isn't by any means one of the stronger albums Thursday did.

One final thing...

A ways back Keith made a comment to me about "A Sketch For Time's Arrow" on the CD in Kill The House Lights. He said it was much an incomplete song and unwanted material like "This Song Is Brought To You By A Falling Bomb" on the album War All The Time... Which I have to flat-out disagree!

Though "This Song Is Brought To You By A Falling Bomb" isn't one of Thursday's strongest songs instrumentally... I think it has some of the most vivid imagery in it that makes it entirely a totally sweet song by itself!

I personally think the first few lines are the most striking:

Do you hear the jet plane yawning miles across the sky,
Hear the garbage truck back down the boulevard
Setting off the car alarms as it passes by?

Now, can't you just see and hear it? The lyrics just come to life in your mind!

... At least they do in mine, and I think that makes it a totally sweet song!

Which makes "This Song Is Brought To You By A Falling Bomb" on the album War All The Time, nowhere near comparable to "A Sketch For Time's Arrow" on the CD in Kill The House Lights, which I agree isn't anywhere near a decent or completed song in and of itself!

So now you are more prepared for Keith's supposed rebuttal to the attack I made on his comment, in which he promises to bash me quite a bit... but for which we have seen absolutely nothing from yet!!

Do your best Keith!

Click Here To Read The Full Article By Itself.

Why I've Not Posted In A While...

Some of you may have noticed I haven't posted in a while... and wondered quietly to yourself "Why?"

(Ok, maybe not, but I'll tell you anyway...)

And that is for the plain reason that I royally messed up my computer and nearly lost everything on it!

Here's the story:

As I mentioned earlier after I came back from my relatively recent trip to California I had to use Disk Utility on my MacMini's Hard Disk, due to it getting corrupted somehow.

When I used Disk Utility to repair my HD, it created a folder at the root level of my startup disk called "lost+found" (or something like that)... which I didn't notice until about a couple weeks ago.

From that folder I was able to get back a little of the music I lost the first time (see this post for more).

In that folder were a bunch of other folders with with a bunch of numbers for their names and in the folders were a bunch of resources with a bunch of numbers in their names... which I had no idea where they were from.

Well, after pulling the music I found from the folders I proceeded to delete the /lost+found folder.

When emptying the trash, in order to delete the folder it asked me to enter my password... Which should probably have been a sign that something in there shouldn't be deleted.

But not thinking, I went ahead and entered my password and deleted the folder anyway.

Then the next time I shutdown my computer (which I hardly ever do) and tried to start it again I was greeted with a black screen that said:

disk0s2: 3x0xe0030005 (UNDEFINED).
disk0s2: 3x0xe0030005 (UNDEFINED).
disk0s2: 3x0xe0030005 (UNDEFINED).
Mar 13 12:16:10 Launchd: can't exec /bin/sh for single users Input/Output error

And it would keep showing that error line after line over and over again.

So apparently I messed with something that shouldn't have been messed with.

I tried whatever I could to try to fix it, but that day we didn't have Internet access... so I couldn't look anything up online!

The first thing I did was to copy all my important files and documents over to an external hard disk. Which I had to do booting from my OSX Install Disk and using terminal.

I started copying everything over one file and folder at a time using the commands $ cp /file/to/copy /place/to/copy/to and $ mkdir /location/to/create/directory...

Remember I didn't have Internet access so I didn't have internet access and was not all that brushed up on *nix commands to know about the recursive copy command flag ($ cp -R /entire/folder/to/copy /location/to/copy/to) until I asked my dad if there was an easier way to copy files through the terminal.

After doing that I figured that maybe if I just upgraded from tiger to leopard I might be able to save just about everything. But after I tried to do that I the computer wouldn't recognize the disk as a mountable volume.

Knowing that I'd have to erase that disk anyway to get it back, I just decided to install the new bigger hard disk I had just bought after I got back from California.

I chose to install the new hard disk on the same day when Time Warner Cable was checking out our cable internet connections in our house.

So I popped open my MacMini and installed the new hard disk I had... a huge 250 GB disk to replace the 100 GB disk I originally got with it.

I needed this new disk so that I could install both Leopard and Tiger on two separate partitions, with all my music and other stuff on the 100 GB disk I couldn't do it with sufficient space for each boot partition.

And it wasn't until just the end of last week that I was able to install everything back on Tiger for production once again!

Click Here To Read The Full Article By Itself.

How To Handle A Faulty HD & The Loss Of Your Music With Your iPod

Ok, that might be a bit of a long name, but it's important... if you don't want to loose as much time and music as I have when you run into a similar situation!

I'm not sure how but in the last couple weeks, after taking my Mac Mini computer with me on a trip to California, I've lost a fair amount of data on my hard drive.

I'm aware that my Hard Drive was corrupted before my trip so it might not be entirely on how my baggage was handled to and from California.

But in California when I would select some of the songs that went missing in my iTunes playlist or library, I would always encounter the annoying spinning beachball pointer, or the swirling torrent of colors...

While in California I didn't want to hassle with trying to fix it because there was enough things there I was busy doing... or should have been doing.

I had all my music synced on my iPod, so all I had to do was somehow find a way to get the music from my iPod back into my iTunes directory somehow.

So when I got back from California, being fed-up with the tracks that were no longer on my HD and subsequently causing my iPod to take forever to sync and making it impossible to browse my iTunes music directory, I downloaded and installed Super Remove Dead Tracks from Doug's AppleScripts for iTunes.

That was the absolutely wrong script to use at the time, because it didn't do anything for the core problem of my corrupt Hard Drive and erased the mp3 files from my iPod the next time it was synced.

Though I'm glad that it was only 55 tracks of not-so important stuff (though I will try to get it back again somehow anyways).

If you don't really care about the music that you've lost then it might be just fine to use that script.

Since I knew that I was going to try to upgrade from Tiger to Leopard... or actually install them both on the same HD... I knew I was going to have to repair the HD.

So I popped in the Tiger install disks that came with my Mac Mini, and used the Disk Repair Utility to repair my corrupted Hard Disk.

As one should expect several files, mostly my music though, went missing in the process; but after repairing the HD I was able to browse the iTunes directory and click on dead tracks in my iTunes library without getting the beachball cursor or the swirling torrent of colors cursor!

That solved that problem....

But as a result more music went missing. This time it was 100 tracks with a lot of good stuff, so I really want to get it back in the easiest way possible.

I first downloaded and installed iLinkPod to see what I could get from the music files on my iPod.

Realizing how much time it would take to manually identify each individual or even a group of files to pick out the ones that went missing I soon went looking for another alternative.

Then I eventually found and tried out Ollie's iPod Extractor - but I had no luck with it... I kept getting an AppleScript error indicating to big of a parameter string or something.

Here's How To Get Your Music Off Your iPod And Into iTunes Again...

I kept searching until I found the Show iPod Song Files script on Doug's AppleScripts for iTunes site.

NOTE: to use this script you must have the "Manually manage music (and videos)" checkbox on your iPod's setting checked.

Install it in your iTunes Scripts folder.

Select a song (or songs) in your iPod's library or one of it's playlists and then click on the scripts icon in the menubar (left of the "Help" menubar item) and choose the Show iPod Song Files option.

This will then open up a window in the finder with the music file highlighted.

As long as you have the "Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library" checkbox selected in your iTunes Preferences' "Advanced" settings all you have to do is double-click or open the highlighted file and it will add it to your iTunes Library and folder in the right spot!

Sure that might be a little more work than what Ollie's iPod Extractor is supposed to do but if you don't have too much music missing (or have the time) and Ollie's iPod Extractor doesn't work for you, then you can use the Show iPod Song Files script from Doug's AppleScripts for iTunes site.

Which is exactly what I will be using to recover my files!

Recently I just heard about PodWorks, but I don't think it checks to see if any of the mp3 files (listed in the iTunes Library file) are missing from your iTunes folder to copy them over.... it looks like it just will transfer the mp3 files that aren't listed in the iTunes Library file.

Click Here To Read The Full Article By Itself.

New Blog Design

Today I finally was able to work through and put together phase two of my site design, and that was of redesigning this blog's site template.

I made the site template of this blog much like the template of my website at www.benjaminvanscoter.com, by taking the template and style that I was using and modifying it to fit within the template I have on my site.

Sure, it might not be perfect or all that glamorous... (as I think of that terrible PCD or whoever sings it song)... but it looks good and will do the job for the time being.

Now I can work on posting about a lot of the stuff that I've been holding off on!

Click Here To Read The Full Article By Itself.