Aloha Airlines is ceasing operations. This means that we are losing one of our airlines here in Sacramento. It’s a sad day for all of us here. Aloha were our first common use airline and we spent a lot of time working alongside them as a result. The people there really did embody the idea of ʻohana – a sort of extended family. They will be missed.

I connected my iPhone to my computer today for the first time since upgrading and it didn’t see it. Apparently, this is a known issue related to having the latest version of iTunes prior to upgrading. The solution is to reinstall iTunes, which allowed my iPhone to be seen, but something I did has caused my iTunes library to be all kinds of messed up. I’m not sure whether it was upgrading, reinstalling, moving the library to a different external drive or something else. The result is that iTunes is not exactly functional. I’ll work on it some more this week, but I have another fun project that is a bit more pressing. More on that shortly.

I recently got my hands on a copy of Leopard, but when I went to install it, I ran into a problem – I was short on disk space. I pondered a couple of solutions. One possible solution is to move things to my external hard drive, but a not-so-big cat, named My Inner Child for comedic purposes, decided to make that difficult for me. My Inner Child likes to climb, as most cats do. She perched atop my external enclosure and used it as a jumping off point. As she did this, the enclosure fell to the floor. Since that time, the drive inside has made some rather angry clicking and whirring noises. I will probably pick up a replacement this weekend and proceed to transfer everything over. I may also grab a bigger 2.5″ disk for inside my Mac mini and another enclosure to use the current disk as a portable spare, which should come in quite useful if I ever decide to buy the EeePC that has been the object of my techno-lust of late.

Now, onto the noises. I have become addicted to Growl for the Mac. It is just so beautifully integrated with so many of the day to day utilities that I use. While at work, I am unable to bask in the computing joy that is the Mac, so I was quite pleased to discover Snarl, which is pretty much the same idea, albeit a little earlier in the development cycle. Once it’s more mature, I’m sure it will become much more useful to me.

When I saw the iPhone Enterprise announcement earlier today, I got giddy. There are two things in there that will likely make my life easier – ActiveSync support for Exchange (I don’t like the nasty beast, but I have to interact with two of them for work) and Cisco IPSec VPN. As it is, I’ve been sort of fudging the work mail thing by forwarding to GMail, but direct integration will mean that I no longer have to do that. IPSec will mean that I’ll be able to connect back to our servers while in the field on a public network. Mostly, I’ll be happy when I’m not the only one toting an iPhone around here and get to experience acceptance rather than envy relating to my excellent taste in cellular telephony.

Over the next week or thereabouts, I’ll be leaving Elk Grove and Sacramento County behind. I’m not moving far – just to Roseville in the neighbouring Placer County. We were going to have Surewest provide our TV and internet but the inability to use the dual tuner TiVo unfortunately overshadowed the possibility of 10 Mb/s up and down. Who knows what the future brings as I prepare to step into the world of High Definition TV later in the year, but I don’t think that Surewest has the necessary CableCard setup that HDTivo requires. A Surewest rep did attempt to sell us on their home rolled DVR, but once you’ve used TiVo, nothing else quite lives up to the experience. I’m finally going to complete the unholy shoehorning of a Soekris board into the skin of a dead piece of Linksys equipment, so I’ll probably post on that when I get round to it.