On Thursday morning, I dropped her off at the vet clinic for observation. I am constantly amused when I walk in with my pet carrier and declare that I have MacGyver for a visit and all the people in the area all go, “Oooh, MacGyver” with various levels of trepidation and/or amusement in their voices. Her reputation (and the thickness of her medical chart) just continues to grow. She was at the clinic for the day and the vet found that she had a bladder infection and suspected that was most likely the cause of the “out of the box” urination and the loss of appetite. She prescribed some Clavamox and told me that Mac would most likely be hungry when she got home since she hadn’t eaten that day. I hoped for the best. When I got her home, she did go right for her dish and eat more than she’d eaten in days. Unfortunately, that pattern wasn’t to continue. I started her on the Clavamox (2x a day for a week), but she still wasn’t eating.

MacGyver resting on Thursday evening

My mom was a good kitty sitter and came to watch her and medicate her while I was in Chicago on Friday night. Mac wouldn’t eat for my mom either. When I got home on Saturday night, she was even more listless and fatigued than on Thursday night. She wasn’t eating at all. She was starting to stumble around, which I assumed was from lack of food. It was sad. But she was still drinking. I started attempting to syringe feed her to try to get her to perk up. I was up all night with her on Saturday. She would get off the bed every couple of hours to go out and drink these tiny amounts of water over a long period of time. She would wake me up (and woke up my mom the previous night the same way) because she was having such a hard time moving that she would basically fall off the bed. So I would get up, watch her drink, and then carry her back to bed when she was done. We did this every two hours or so from 11pm until about 6:30am. Then we slept a little while longer, but really I was waking up about every 20 minutes to see if she was still alive. I really thought it was going to be the end. But every time, she’d be breathing and purring.

At around 11am, I finally really got out of bed and realized I needed to make a decision about Mac, unfortunately, very little sleep was not letting my rational mind process as I wanted, so I called the vet clinic and rambled on to some unsuspecting vet tech. I then rambled my way to the decision I should take her back to the clinic. Mac still had enough fight in her to make getting her into the cat carrier difficult. Got to the clinic around noon and met what had to be the last remaining clinic employee who hadn’t yet met MacGyver. Thankfully, the vet, Dr. Brown, was very familiar with the temperament of my cat and could recognize that she was lethargic. Upon examination, Mac had lost another half a pound since she had been weighed the previous Monday, so that wasn’t good. She was also dehydrated, so the doctor presented a two-step plan to me.

The first step is to admit her to the emergency clinic and start her on IV fluids for a day or two, along with giving her the antibiotics via IV to rule that out as a cause of stomach upset/loss of appetite. The second step is, once/if she stabilizes and starts eating again, to do a biopsy (but not surgically) of her lower intestinal tract to try and figure out why she continues to have diarrhea. The thinking behind that is there might be a condition that is treatable that is causing her to have the problems with eating and her digestion. Her heart sounded good, which was a good sign, since she has had the problems with that before. I haven’t decided on step two for sure yet, we’re still working on step one.

It was a lonely afternoon and evening without her, but the clinic is great about giving you an update anytime you call. I’m lucky to have a great 24-hour emergency clinic close at hand. I called this morning and they were still syringe feeding her every four hours, but she was taking the syringe food well, so that was positive news. Before lunch, another vet (who’s seen Mac many times) called after doing the morning evaluations, saying she had just eaten a tiny bit of food on her own, but that they were continuing to syringe feed her and thought it would be best to keep her for one more day. The clinic did need one of her meds that they don’t keep on hand (I have to have it compounded at a different pharmacy in town), so over lunch I went home and picked it up and then went to the clinic to visit her. They were really nice about bringing her to me in an exam room and letting me spend some time with her. She was less than amused most of the time, but she seemed a little better. She was still a little unstable, but I wasn’t sure if it was because she was still weak or because the exam table she was standing on was so slick under her overly furry feet.

Here she is today, her head isn’t that big, its just a weird angle

I just got off the phone with the clinic and the news stays the same. She’s still not eating on her own and they’re still feeding her and she’s letting them feed her ok, though there was a report of her giving some “attitude”, which sounds about right.

I’ll see what’s going on tomorrow. If she really just won’t eat anymore, then maybe it is her time, but she just had too much fight in her for me to not make sure there isn’t something treatable causing it.

As for the other “mac” mentioned in the title: I ordered a new 24″ iMac today. More on that later…

Mac love knows no bounds.

Now I won’t get to skip lunch and play MacWorld Bingo with my co-worker…. ARRRRGGHHH!

Seriously. This means it will be the best keynote ever since I’m going to have to miss it. BLEH!

Harry and Kelli made an appearance on the opening weekend. Was Harry picking up a iPod HiFi?

Just another reason I kinda love him… he’s a Mac guy.

Photo borrowed from apple.com. (Don’t sue me, Steve!)
Photo pointed out to me by Jerry.

Yesterday I repaired permissions and that didn’t seem to help, so I took the next step and dug out the OS X install dvd to boot up and repair the hard drive. Um, yeah. Not so much. It threw some unfixable disk error. Lovely.

But it could be worse, I could have to deal with skunks…

I’ve not done a clean install on this system since, well, ever. Its been over two years since I got my 15″ bundle of joy so its not a totally unexpected thing. The system has had a lot of unnecessary crap accumulating on it for a while now. I don’t mind a reinstall too much, when it isn’t a result of a catastrophic failure, its like spring cleaning for your OS. Spent last night dumping pretty much everything to my external drive, a purchase that I am now extremely happy that I made. I’m going to run home at lunch and copy a couple of other things I remembered to back up and then set it to wiping.

Regarding this entry’s title, Frosty sums up the situation:

Sorry about your computer deciding to suck. It seems that there is a
very limited number of things where it is a positive outcome when
they decide to suck. Vacuums are one of these. Computers are not.

I love the Apple snark on that page:

Boot Camp will burn a CD of all the required drivers for Windows so you don’t have to scrounge around the Internet looking for them.

EFI and BIOS
Macs use an ultra-modern industry standard technology called EFI to handle booting. Sadly, Windows XP, and even the upcoming Vista, are stuck in the 1980s with old-fashioned BIOS. But with Boot Camp, the Mac can operate smoothly in both centuries.

Word to the Wise
Windows running on a Mac is like Windows running on a PC. That means it’ll be subject to the same attacks that plague the Windows world. So be sure to keep it updated with the latest Microsoft Windows security fixes.

I wouldn’t want to taint my Mac (whenever I get a new Intel version one) with Windows anything except that it would make testing websites in mutliple browsers/OS much much simpler.

Design a Steve Jobs Movie Poster

ETA: I updated that link to go to the winner and the best 40 submissions in an easy-to-view slideshow.

I’m at work, but I’m on my PowerBook that, although slower and having only a G4 chip, has a much cooler name than the new Intel-powered MacBooks.

Here’s the setup for today’s Dilbert moments: Tomorrow my work machine (a Dell with dual Xeon processors) was to be migrated from our Novell Network to Microsoft Active Directory. This is a company-wide migration. I should’ve known this would be the portent of something bad when the 16 page document on what we had to do to prepare for this was entitled a “Survival Guide.” The main step that I was concerned about was having my files backed up. My work machine has three hard drives; a 10GB, a 40GB, and a 200GB. I learned the hard way last year to keep the 200GB backed up as it stores log files. I archive files from it to DVD each month. This morning, I intended to pull down last week’s logfiles and then backup all of January as well as archiving my C: drive documents.

I’d been at work about an hour. Files were downloading in the background, I was listening to iTunes and checking a couple of websites, when all of a sudden… BAM! My whole system just stops. No music, no cursor movement, no ctrl-alt-anything. My system does crash from time to time, but usually no matter what else freezes up, iTunes just keeps playing. That Apple software just keeps on keeping on despite the Microsoft OS tanking. But not this morning. iTunes went right along with everything else.

I gave it a hard reboot from the button on the CPU and it restarted.
Got past the main Dell boot splash and then the black screen of “you don’t want to know what we’re telling you with these white characters” appeared with the dreaded words:

Primary hard drive 0 not found
Primary hard drive 1 not found
Secondary hard drive 1 not found

This does not bode well.

F1 or F2 did no good, just around in a circle of “you’re hosed.”

I called tech support and expressed my displeasure. They said they’d send someone “right over.”

I cleaned my desk and my keyboard and recycled and read some journals.

An hour passed.

The tech guy, who’s name I should know since he always bails me out, comes walking down the hall. He doesn’t look too amused. He says, “when I saw your name on the sheet I knew it couldn’t be good.” That’s right, dear readers, my computer has a reputation. It is feared by IT.

He hits a few keys. Stares into the blackness for a few minutes and declares he’s taking the whole machine with him. This is sounding bleaker by the moment. But, true to form, even this isn’t simple.

Rewind to a couple of months ago, there was a virus that went around the network and in order to install the patch, we had to have our machines completely off the network. Which should’ve been easy, unplug cable, install patch, plug in cable, and you’re done. Except my ethernet cable has somehow become jammed in the back of my machine. People tried knives and pencils and screwdrivers, but no one could get it out. In the end, they got central services to come move a heavy metal storage cabinet out from in my co-worker Jeff’s cube so they could disconnect the other end of the cable instead.

IT dude remember this whole issue quickly, waits about 5 seconds and gets out his pocket knife to just cut the cord and free my machine from its ethernet teather.

He takes it and leaves me with nothing but a non-functional ethernet cable and a monitor.

That was almost two and a half hours ago and I’ve not heard back.

I went home at lunch and got my own computer since no one’s offering me another machine here and even if they did, it wouldn’t have all my webmistress software on it. At least my own mac is already set up to do web work. Now if my company would only compensate me in someway for this (as if), because I could’ve just gotten a book and sat and read for the rest of the day.

And what do I charge this time to? IT has no budget codes. Which reminded Jeff of this great Dilbert strip:

Maybe I’ll use my now-worthless ethernet cable and fill in code 39 for part of the afternoon…

“No,” I say, “I just like Steve Jobs better.”

It is MacWorld Expo 2006 time. Its Keynote Tuesday.

I’m spending the next hour or so waiting patiently while a well-designed website automatically updates me on the news out of the Reality-Distortion Field.

What things will Steve bring us to inflame our techno-lust?

A 10.4 update, iLife ’06, yadda yadda yadda… get to the One More Thing™

[blockquote]An Intel clean-room-suit guy walks out of a cloud of smog with a 12″ silicon wafer and says, “Steve I want to report that Intel’s ready. ” Takes off his his helmet — it’s Paul Otellini Intel CEO.[/blockquote]

Only Steve Jobs could get another high-power CEO do something like that. *chuckle*

So the first Intel Mac will be an iMac… cool. My mom will be in the market for one of those by the time they get the bugs worked out.

I have to go and do other stuff. I’m able to supress my technolust. My powerbook is still good for another couple of years, regardless of hardware updates that will tempt me.

Most Played Songs (since my last system reboot)

Highest Rated/Favorite Songs