Saturday November 03, 2007

A few photos from the recent Head of the Charles Regatta, the world's largest two-day rowing event. Held annually in Cambridge Massachusetts on the Charles River, 2007 marked the 43rd anniversary of the event.

The photos were taken at the Weeks Footbridge, about 1.5 miles from the race's starting point and about halfway to the finish line. The last photo is of Dunster House. at Harvard.

With my repair history and the latest problem on my MacBook Pro, Apple agreed to replace the entire machine. This article marks my last entry about the old machine and my first about the new one.

I am writing this from my new 2.2 GHz Core 2 Duo MBP with 2 GB memory and a 160 GB 7200rpm drive. My original machine had a 7200rpm drive and I was happy Apple agreed to maintain that capability, upgrading me from 100 GB to 160 GB as a result. Thank you, Apple.

All is not completely well, however. First, there was the wireless problem. Some newer MBPs just randomly freeze their wireless network connections even though nearby machines chug cheerily on with no problems. I haven't read the Apple forums, but Eric has had the problem for some time and he tells me it has been discussed there actively. He also told me that he hasn't had the problem since upgrading to Leopard so I upgraded last night. Too early to tell if the problem is gone, but I'm hopeful.

The other problem is Second Life and it's a bad problem. After using Second Life for some random period (say, 30-60 minutes) my entire machine locks up. Meaning Expose doesn't work, sometimes the mouse won't move, and in one instance even the beachball was frozen. Power cycling the machine is the only recourse. And upgrading to Leopard didn't help. The problem is known and documented on the Second Life site here. According to the article, there is a problem with the driver for the nVidia GeForce 8600M GT graphics chipset. The article also suggests a workaround of sorts, though it is fairly awkward. I may have no choice but to try it since I am supposed to help staff Sun's SL Supercomputing '07 booth in a week or so.