Alin's Site

Restore from Time Machine

Tempted around all the hype of OS X Mavericks… Want it so bad that you will download a pirated developer seed? BE CAREFUL. I don’t advocate for or against piracy. The seed I use is a legit one, I have a dev account

If your a heavy Mac user… And who isn’t you probably have a few kernel extensions laying around your computer that are really important for it to work properly. Heck even if your a light user you still probably have some of the buggers laying around kexts are what they are called and they are a real pain in the ass in Mavericks because Mavericks changes how they work.

I installed it on my machine and hoped for the best. It booted fine but the minute I logged in it would give me a 10 second glimpse into what Mac OS X is to become and then suddenly kick me back to the login window.

Odd isn’t it… Almost makes me think the install package I got is corrupted. After burning up what will in the end be about 4-6 hours for nothing I am not going to gamble anymore with my machine. I’ll wait for some Developer Preview 2 action to come along. Or try this one again with a fresh install package… I don’t know… I really don’t know.

This being said if you do feel daring.

MAKE A PARTITION FOR MAVERICK AND USE MIGRATION ASSISTANT AND THEN ERASE YOUR PRIMARY PARTITION ONCE YOU ARE SURE IT WORKS SO YOU DONT WASTE A WHOLE DAY LIKE I JUST DID.

I will be ‘live blogging now’ until I am up and running.

1:47 PM INSTALL START
2:55 PM INSTALL FAIL… BACK TO MOUNTAIN LION I GO.
4:30 PM RESTORED LION… TIME TO MAKE A PARTITION FOR MAVERICK.
4:45 PM GOT FRESH INSTALL IMAGE…
5:00 PM CLOING MY DISK TO ‘MAVERICK’ (SANDBOX) PARTITION
5:40 PM CHECKING THAT CLONE IS SUFFICIENTLY IDENTICAL
5:45 PM BOOTING TO CLONE… HERE GOES NOTHING…
6:00 PM INSTALLING MAVERICK ON CLONE… THIS TIME I’LL VIDEO TAPE IT
6:40 PM AGAIN… INOPERABLE… DOES NOT HAVE CORESERVICES FOLDER… GOING TO TRY TO FIX

I Quote “I don’t know who coded this crap, humans or a bunch of chimps.”
Moms reply “Don’t be insulting to the chimps they would have done a better job.”

6:52 PM MAN AM I STUBBORN… INSTALLING IT ON A BLANK VOLUME NOW… GONNA TAKE A BATH WHILE THIS SHIT INSTALLS.
7:10 PM INSTALLED… LETS SEE IF I CAN MIGRATE MY CRAP. FIRST ILL TINKER A BIT AND ENJOY.
7:20 PM DONE TINKERING STARTING MIGRATION
7:33 PM DOES NOT LIKE MY DATA AT ALL… I GIVE UP…

I’m not even going to bother uploading the video’s… They are easily 30 minutes of me cursing this beta out. This does not even qualify for the tag “Beta” this is more of an alpha if you ask me. The videos are all going in my trash.

As for the OS… I will install it back on the partition and do a fresh install video sometime. And then I will manually bring over my documents and some programs that I can’t live without. It’s about time I did a manual migration anyway…

Dr O’Leary showed up able to fill my pump. Yay.

STRAP IN 10:00 AM APPROX
DEPART PGH 10:09 AM
ARRIVE LGH 10:42 AM
REGISTERED 10:50 AM
PREOP 10:57 AM
IN OR 12:30 PM
PHASE 1:24 PM
PHASE 2 2:25 PM
DEPART LGH 4:04 PM
ARRIVE PGH 4:36 PM

Also theres this new song.

Check the O.R

Originally named after Organized Rhyme I made it to reflect the Operating Room.

Who cares about drug and crime rap! We want hospital rap!

Here it is!

Alright so I am very late on getting this trach countdown up. Actually to the point I am counting down to something that is only 4 hours away as of the time of this posting.

Reason is I have the trach change song totally ready. It’s called Check the O.R and I will have it publicly posted momentarily, hit my youtube for it.

I will publicize the video later with the trach log post.

Woah, where to start. So much stuff been going on here in my life recently… GIVE ME A BREAK ALREADY. Too much at once.

Oh well no rest for the evil they say or something like that, I forgot.. Whateverrrrr.

Things will be quieting down starting tomorrow thankfully. Just have a friend coming over to visit and thats it. Fingers crossed that he does not have to cancel, he had to last week because of food poisoning.

Me with Addy’s card in the envelope

So a close friend of mine named Addy had a shunt malfunction and is having surgery to fix it this week. I decided to send off a get well card with a small Amazon gift card inside. She loved it! And there is legally court admissible evidence of that below in the form of Exhibit A. A video taping from her mom.

She is so cute, gotta love that HUGE grin. When she sticks her tongue out that means yes, so when you saw her get asked books and she had little response that was a no. Big time move’s on the tongue for toys. Look’s like they’ll be on Amazon.com soon after they get home picking out toys.In addition I made a virtual drive video of me driving to and from the post box where I put her card in the post. I plan to make more “CyberDrive Palatine” videos soon based on feedback from people.

Mel3 card

What you don’t know by now that I have names for some of my special objects? Alright, hit here and read. Anyway I can’t believe I have had my littmann around for 3 years. So useful with my lungs, mom lungs, and our old dog. I can’t mention how many times I have used this thing to turn a bad situation into a easily fixed issue instead of something that could go from bad to worse. Thanks Mel3

Sunday the 2nd was Amanda Liberties birthday, she is drummergirll on Youtube. She is now 29 years old. She has a very large collection of all things patriotic mostly focused on flags and the Statue of Liberty. I have a costume she gave me 2 years ago and I decided, while I might not be able to stand and hold a torch. Why not in my wheelchair holding up my joystick. And thusly the Cripple of Liberty was born. Check it out, photos down below, and a short video, and the whole birthday party recorded thanks to Google Hangout on Air.

Strapped in my chair. Statue of Cripple Liberty

Here we go, strapped in my wheelchair holding my joystick… The Cripple of Liberty, funny enough I think it would be pretty cool to see this type of thing as a real statue. Anyone else agree?

That’s me the Crip of Liberty.

In that video above is me again and also just us having fun.

Laptop with Mouse

If you work for Apple and your reading this… LISTEN UP!!!

If you don’t work for Apple well then treat this as standard news about what the hell is going on with my life.

As you all know I depend on my laptop every single day for my life. I mean I am on this thing All the time. If I’m not on the laptop I’m on my phone, if I’m not on either of the two I’m on the toilet or in the hospital on a operating table, oh and or in the tub. Put simple I always am on some sort of device.

I don’t go well being disconnected from the world and this is my way of staying connected. My ham radio is gone.

I will show you why in a short video below. If you don’t have time to watch it, put simply, my cursor was moving all over the place on its own without any touching from me and even at times would click. On its own! MENTAL. I think my Re-TINA MacBook Pro somehow got into some cocaine (Tina) and went completely off it’s rocker. I told the Apple store guy to send that one back to the factory to the drug rehab department. But what did I do for the day before I could get it into the store. It failed Thursday and we didn’t go in till Friday… I had to use an external mouse, and it was really unwieldy because of it’s size on my tiny desk.

SushiBook Pro

Anyway Thursday I reached to Apple to get a same day repair Friday, no cigar, in fact it was so bad there was a shortage of the trackpad / upper case assemblies in the stores that he checked. The service rep from Apple checked about 4 stores and then talked to a manager at our local store because he knew I can’t be without a computer for up to 5 days while it gets sent to their central facility for repairs. The computer was so new they decided to just REPLACE the whole machine with a BRAND NEW machine Friday. So below I have the unboxing video of the new machine along with unboxing photos. Note in the middle of the gallery you will see me using it as a 3000 tray to eat my sushi on. So I hereby codename this MacBook Pro the SushiBook Pro. Below I unbox the SushiBook Pro and also theres a video of a Microsoft store right across from Apple. Bad idea Microsoft.

So heres the unboxing of the SushiBook Pro

Now for the doomed Microsoft store.

That store is totally doomed to a horrible fate for sales.

Next video Amanda L. a.k.a drummergirll on youtube did a great impression of me pissed off at PS3 Customer Service and them taking my account offline for no real good reason. ‘Spot Maintenance’ o..k..

Me with my Ham Radio

I got my ham radio on like April 4th and got it installed on my chair on the 6th or so and then had my license on the 11th. Sadly said radio got killed last thursday in a lightning strike that caused a power surge. Hopefully a friend from the ham radio club will help me repair it. I miss my radio.

Me and my new meter

I go hypoglycemic real easily and so I need to monitor my blood sugar closely. I had a small meter but now I wanted one that would do more and give me charting abilities. I have been a bit off my track record of keeping up to date with four reads a day and I really should get back on track so I don’t end up with problems from my weird blood sugar. I am not diabetic, I am considered to have chronic hypoglycemia.

Chicago Vintage Motor Carriage doors

Beyond those two doors is a world of awesome vintage cars, well over 40 of them actually! I had the privilege of a private on site photo shoot of this private collection of cars. I will be going back to shoot photos again, if you want to click and see the photos from my trip to the private car collection and also in general downtown Chicago hit the picture above. I also saw a woman with a really cool purple leather coat that I had to snag a picture, that would go great in October for Rett Syndrome awareness… Now where to get such a coat… hmm. Hit the photos now.

Me after haircut May 2013

May 9th or so I did a nice haircut for my summer time.

Coming soon: Mel3′s birthday photos, Addy’s get well card, Amanda’s birthday present & video’s

I hope to catch up this week on blogging!

British Summer TIme

Remember several years ago my brain ended up running in CET (Central Europe Time) coinciding with germany.

Well this time I am INTENTIONALLY timezone swapping into the British London area. If all goes through nicely my sleep should stay sorted.

In the video above I sing a sort of odd folk song I cane up with called ‘on my banjo’ I do a raw uncooked edit there.

In this video you will notice a style like blue oyster cult I NEED MORE COWBELL. This is Me and Amanda doing the Oh Susanna.

Alright it’s nearly 5:00 AM ‘here’ so I need to go to bed.

10:03 AM STRAP IN
10:09 AM STRAPPED IN
10:19 AM DEPART PGH
10:47 AM ARRIVE LGH
10:50 AM REGISTERING
10:55 AM REGISTERED
10:58 AM PREOP
11:32 AM OR
12:05 PM PHASE 1
1:05 PM PHASE 2
2:41 PM DEPART LGH
3:11 PM ARRIVE PGH

Well my trach is changed, I slept totally weird. I am still working on getting all the photos tagged. It’s gonna take a while to get everything sorted.

My sleep has been wonky though is getting better.

All this said I have SOLD the damn wheelchair is GONE. But bad news here, I am $300 short of money because of the insane fees ebay practically raped me with.

If anyone wants to help offset the fees do a GENERAL fund donation via the PayPal button.

Alright, you know what time it is. It’s trach time, which means, time for a countdown.

11:30 AM today is when I will be going into the O.R according to the schedule.

To go with the tradition I decided to throw together a new song, Owl City Good Time, in the OR.

Heres the video.

countdown now

(Its done)

Alright now moving on to older stuff in chronological order.

Well here it is, on April 11 2013 at 9:22 PM my Ham Radio was officially christened as was my Call Signs maiden voyage. Listen to the maiden voyage above as I talk to some guys on the radio!

Moving along, sometime in april I am so damn backlogged I did some Nascar with Shawn, below is the heap of videos that were taped.

We keep moving and Later in April like the 18th or third Thursday I forgot, All I know is third thursday I gave a presentation at the ham radio club meeting on disabled hams. It was really cool. Original slides and crap are accessible on the Youtube link

About a week later or so I played Grand Theft Auto IV with Shawn and we made some seriously good crashes, here we have a bunch of cars all blow up at the same time! Yeah!

I love playing this casino system called Reel Deal Live, and I won a big assed hand pay. Here it is!

If only that were real money…

We move on now.

Last monday I went to a huge antique car guys place. chicago vintage motor carriage. They have well over 50 cars. We will be going back to shoot more video and pictures. Heres a video dad took inside of Princess Diana’s ROLLS ROYCE!

After there we went downtown cause we were just a tiny bit ways away. So I decided lets go all the way. I came across a curb between me and a good photo shoot opportunity. So I made a video showing the true power under a Permobil’s hood.

After that we had to go to Buckingham Fountain but to get there we had to cross a six lane street… Remind you of a video game, Perhaps… Frogger? I thought so, so I taped a little impression.

This is like a professional steadicam shot walk around of Buckingham Fountain but it’s just me driving my wheelchair. This is an awesome drive around of the entire fountain to classical music. If you cant be here then watch it in Dolby Digital audio.

I made a little GTA IV anthem with Amanda my friend in England, she did most of it I did some of it.

Alright so thats a good pile of videos for y’all to go through, that should hold you over till I get the 600+ photos done!

Oh and as for what will power my phone today, that was unboxed and is in this video

GOODNIGHT

Well, Medicare is making record breaking cuts on wheelchairs and rehab equipment.

Now it’s Illinois Medicaid’s turn and you know that cuts are never good in medical.

Reliable wheelchairs, forget it, you’ll get rickety junk.

Getting it repaired quickly, HAH forget it, expect a 2-3 month wait to get it processed, just for a repair.

What’s worse is this is not about corporate lobbiests in the wheelchair industry, they are lobbying to keep the more expensive better chairs. A lot of suppliers are going bankrupt because they cannot afford to provide good chairs.

UsersFirst and United Spinal Association are now connecting with groups to facilitate wheelchair user’s travel to Springfield to lobby against the cuts with state legislators.

We cannot let the cuts go without a challenge, because if we don’t stand up and oppose these dodo brained attempts to get providers like Medicare, BlueCross, Aetna, etc. pretty much ANY Insurer can pick up on these idiotic policies. Why? Because it let’s them steal more money from you and say, oh yeah we have your health covered. Yet they have the right to then just flip the middle finger and say HAHAHAHA, Custom Wheelchair, GO SCRATCH!

So we have to change the laws to protect Complex Rehab Wheelchairs, and wheelchairs in general. But the complex ones that are custom to each user, not like a airport wheelchair or GASP, one of those lousy scooter chairs that they tout you won’t pay a dollar for on TV.

We also need to preserve the repair right.

Acess Living along with National Spinal Cord Injury Association Illinois Chapter have been instrumental in scheduling and attending meetings at the Illinois State Capitol every week for the past month, and these meetings will continue until we get victory. This, is war.

We need to encourage Illinois lawmakers to sponsor Senate Bill 1733 and House Bill 2503, protecting the Complex Rehab Wheelchair and Senate Bill 1734 and House Bill 2502 to keep repairs a service that require no prior authorization. Wheelchairs are a right to us people just like guns are a right to the gun nuts that need to have the biggest magazines.

Head over to this link (where i syndicated this article from) for more info

Doghead Daisy

Last night (Thursday into Friday) was a real scare, so was this (Friday) morning. I did not sleep much, not that I have been sleeping very good this week to begin with. This week has been a hard week and yesterday did not help. Our dog Daisy began having some really weird neurological type stuff go on and we thought she was getting ready to kick the can. Low and behold we get her into the vets office today and it must be something from what she was doing Wednesday running and being overly active causing pain in her joints and stuff… All said she isn’t dying today but she is really freakishly old.

14 years in human years to dog years = 90 years

She’s really old, so we are taking it all a day at a time.

All that being said I need to get the hell to work on editing all the unboxing photos of my Ham radio and the videos and other video crap. I am so behind on videos it is not funny.

Welcome SARC members and all hams. I’m going to go around the table and this will be just like a net initially only we’re all here in the flesh. Checkins please and state if you have traffic and also if you give permission for your photo to be taken. I will come back to you when your ready with your traffic. If you decline photo permission I will make sure to note that.

1 yes 0 no

Kc9ysn t1 p1

N9vu t0 p1

N9mvo t0 p1

N5hsr t0 p1

Kc9yci t0 p1

Me and N9VU N9MVO N5HSR and KC9YCI

Ok so I had a good lot of people check in on Saturday, 4 other hams in the deli. Hey after all what do you call a gathering of meat in a place with glass windows… A DELI!

Anyway we had a fun time eating and some of us had some drinks and AWESOME DESERT!

Pictures are released for public consumption but please treat them with care as they are part of my Ham Radio Group.

I will be director of the SARC Dinner Club and I look forward to doing that

I also might soon take over their newspaper!

The whole check in process is something common on meetings of hams.