I finally got around to replacing the 160GB drive that came with my 5-year old 17" MacBook Pro with a 500GB drive! :) It's still a 5400 RPM drive, but speed was never a limiting factor in my use of this machine. Now I have 340 GB free! When I get around to it I'll look into my box of hard drives and find the one with my iPhoto and iTunes folders on it! ;) I'll move them back, which is so simple in Mac OS!

So, Carbon Copy Cloner did a nice job, as also did the article I Googled on hard drive replacement for MacBook Pro 17" Models ... A1212 ..., which I found on www.iFixit.com.

The main important thing it told me was that I needed a Torx #6 screwdriver! :) (The location of ALL of the relevant screws to undo is also valuable information!)

Thanks to CCC, which I used via USB2 to the new drive mounted in an external (SATA 2.5") drive case I bought for $20, and years ago to the nifty way that Mac OS can suck itself from one machine to another (via FireWire), there are many programs, utilities and settings that I have never had to redo, even since I installed or configured them on my old iBook G4!

This machine has 4 GB RAM and now this 500 GB drive, so it's pretty nice, except for the broken left shift key, due to a lot of keyboard usage over the years, which I have mapped around with a keyboard mapping utility (KeyRemap4Macbook). I also had to remap it for the Windows virtual machine! I have disabled left-shift and made the caps lock to be equal to right-shift.

A major motivating factor in upgrading the drive space now is that Apple will be releasing Mac OS 10.7 Lion any day now, as the first OS upgrade avaliable via the Mac AppStore!! The main new feature for me is the internal automatic Time Machine backup, that is like Previous versions that you may be able to do with a Windows server shared drive (if your network administrator has configured it), but it will be automatically working ("it just works!"), and not even require you to keep connecting to your Time Machine backup drive in order to have the ability to access all previous versions of your files. Of course it's a good idea to have a separate Time Machine backup to an external drive, or to a (wireless) Time Capsule, because, afterall, the internal one is on the same drive you are using!

For certain life milestones such as birth and marriage, but
particularly traumatic events such as the change of marriage status or
of death, the idea of finding out about your own divorce, or someone's
death via Facebook or Twitter is a matter of both joke and dread!

A service that carries so much trivial chatter hardly feels worthy of
personal, life shattering news, but that is not to detract from the
great assistance of technological services such as a dedicated SMS
broadcast list or an e-mail list of church members used only for
serious matters, that is able to directly inform the people who really
need to know, without any of the problems inherent in human relay
systems like prayer "chains" or simple gossip!

  
(1832)

 A blast from the past. Page 16 has a stop for water in pre-colonial
south-west africa (modern day Walvis Bay, Namibia). An exchange of
small quantities of ordinary stores for ivory and other things one
would think a lot more valuable! Then around the cape for the
sub-antarctic islands, for sealing, as they did in those days. :o

 Darren O. preached on discipleship. 'Just As I Am', 'I Surrender All",
and some pretty intense worship songs, Breathe, Surrender, .... Rowie
joined Alanna and Nathan in the worship team for the first time.

 Bible passage for contemplation: Luke 9:18-25.

 18 ¶ And it came about that when he was in prayer, by himself, and the
disciples were with him, he put a question to them, saying, Who do the
people say I am?
 19 And they, answering, said, John the Baptist; but others say
Elijah; and others, that one of the old prophets has come back.
 20 And he said, But who do you say that I am? And Peter, answering,
said, The Christ of God.
 21 But he gave them special orders, not to say this to any man;
 22 Saying, The Son of man will undergo much and be rejected by the
rulers and the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and be put
to death, and on the third day he will come back to life.
 23 And he said to them all, If any man has a desire to come after me,
let him give up all, and take up his cross every day, and come after
me.
 24 For whoever has a desire to keep his life will have it taken from
him, but whoever gives up his life because of me, will keep it.
 25 For what profit will a man have if he gets all the world, but
undergoes loss or destruction himself?

Updating an earlier post, I didn't get the job in Ballarat, — I heard I was number two! :( ... Anyway, I got a different job, in Geelong, instead. :)

Thinking about yesterday's church happenings.

Jimmy preached in the morning, as Kirb is on long service leave. I'm not sure if he had a title to the message,
but it would certainly have been "God's Amazing Grace to Manasseh!"

2 Chronicles 33:1-19

 Having saved a lot of space by deleting Windows Vista not so long ago,
I replaced it with the release candidate of Vista's replacement
Windows 7, the trial licence of which will expire on June 1st 2010.
Even that is not a terminal problem, as the only handicap Microsoft
cites for after that is that it will close down every two hours!
Actually, except at work (where I have to use Windows, mostly the
Server version, nearly all day) I rarely use Windows for more than a
matter of minutes, to grab some information or to test something. The
Mac is pretty handy for network admin tasks (and running the best of
all types of software), so it is never far away. :)