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October 24, 2005
And on the eighty-fourth day, Powerbook crashed.
Well it took 84 days, 18 hours and 34 minutes, but my Powerbook finally crashed.
To many nerds your machine's uptime is something you wear on your chest like a badge of honor. Read any slashdot story about a kernel update and you'll know what I'm talking about. It's something that differentiates you from the common-folk, the plebeians, the, uhh... you know, normal people.
If you hadn't figured out already, I'm not normal people. But on that same note, uptime isn't a real big deal to me, really it isn't. Whenever I reboot my machine I say to myself "this time I'm not going to care about uptime, I'll reboot whenever." Then a few days pass... then a few weeks... then it's like a month, and I'm like, "eh... why not, let's see how far we can go." I blame the uptime Dashboard widget. It's nice to hit F12 and see where we're at. Which made finally hitting the reset button today that much more painful.
What did it take? A two-headed attack from Microsoft, obviously. Fucking Microsoft. I was plugging in a Windows-formatted NTFS hard drive, and before it mounted completely I also launched Windows Media Player to show someone the hysterical Star Wars Episode III redone as a gay love story trailer. Bad move. WMP sucks anyway, and Tiger's support for non HFS volumes is good, but not excellent. Anyway... I sat around for about 15 minutes waiting for something to happen, but eventually I just gave up and shut it down.
I turned on the Powerbook in Washington DC this summer on my roadtrip, took it across the country, from Chicago to South Dakota, to the Grand Canyon to Vegas, to LA to San Francisco, on two 737s back to Albany, on two roadtrips to Boston, one to Philly and back here to Clinton before it finally froze up. I think it probably could have gone on at least until the next OS X update came out, but well... we'll never know. Mother bitches. The previous record was a voluntary restart. I suspect the next one will be as well, what with the bug-fix aplenty 10.4.3 apparently just around the corner.
Posted by pat at October 24, 2005 04:46 PM
Comments
Hi! I think i've beaten your record, since my uptime record is
113 days on my 12" 1GHz Powerbook. But it's still running, so maybe I'm going to reach the 200 days mark?
michi:~ michi$ uptime
22:37 up 113 days, 22 mins, 3 users, load averages: 0.48 0.67 0.67
Posted by: michi at April 11, 2006 04:46 PM