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Blunt-nose parrot fish

I've had a busy week or so trying to keep up/catch up with all of stuff for my photography business, Rodrigues Digital Media, so I decided that I would take a 1/2 day for some spearfishing with my new friend Ken Oakes. Since my boat is out of commission right now, we rented one of the MWR's whalers. We tried a few spots but ended up anchoring at the Spanish Steps. We free-dove the Orote Point. I ended up shooting my first two fish with my new Rob Allen 120 cm railgun. They were both blunt-nose parrot fish (I think thats what they are called). I shot the first one in about 65 feet of water. I dive bombed him from the top, leveled out at 50 feet, and then he turned on his side to look at me and I took the shot...perfect! I got him on the stringer and was on my way back to the boat, and I saw another group of parrotfish, so I repeated the dive bombing and came up with another one, slightly smaller than the first. They were both very good sized parrot fish for Guam. I'm pretty stoked, they were the first fish I've shot with my gun, and to get two on one day is awesome!

I weighed the parrot fish when I cleaned them and the bigger one weighed 8 lbs and the smaller one weighed 6 lbs.

Rodrigues Digital Media

I got my updated business website online today! I switched from using Apple's iweb to hand coding the site in xhtml and css. You can check it out here:

http://rodriguesdigitalmedia.com

I liked the way the site looked in iweb, so I styled the hand coded site to look the same. I'd love to hear what you think.

Enjoy!!

btw- the site is best viewed with the following browsers:

Safari>>>Firefox>>IE 7>IE 6

Best>>Worst

If you haven't tried it, try downloading Apple's Safari for Windows, it rocks!!

Church-Rodrigues Wedding

The complete set of Holly's wedding pictures can be viewed online here:

http://gallery.mac.com/randallrodrigues#100037

For anyone who would like to order some prints of any of the photos, you can visit the online store here:

http://www.printroom.com/pro/rodriguesdigitalmedia

Enjoy!

Time Machine is working again!

Since I had success backing up my MacBook Pro with Carbon Copy Cloner, I thought that I would give Time Machine one more chance. So I turned it on this morning and to my surprise, it worked! It made a successful backup of the entire hard drive, and has been doing consecutive hourly backups ever since. The only thing that I have done since the last attempt was delete the .dmg (disk images) files that I had in my downloads directory. One of the files had caused Carbon Copy Cloner to hang, so I guess there was some sort of problem with the .dmg files that I was keeping around.

The two sides of Apple's Time Machine

Unfortunately, I've been living through another computer disaster this week. I seem to be plagued with bad luck with my 17" MacBook Pro. Since buying it I have had the battery swell up (thanks Sony!), the graphics card go kaput, the hard drive became corrupt while upgrading to Leopard in March, and on Monday (4/21) my hard drive again became corrupt and the computer would not boot. This has really been a big headache for me because my MacBook Pro is my principle production computer that I do all my photography work on. My older systems will not run Aperture, and they run Photoshop CS3 very slowly. So when the MacBook Pro goes down, everything comes to a screeching halt.

When I upgraded to Os X v 10.5 Leopard, I bought a new 250 GB external hard drive and set it up as a Time Machine backup disk. Time Machine is one of the main "new" features in Leopard and promised to be a no brains, hands off method to back up your system so that you would never loose a file in case of an accidental deletion, or worse, a hard drive failure. Having just lived through a hard drive failure while upgrading my system to Leopard, I thought that this was a great new feature and eagerly set it up. The setup was a breeze, and after Time Machine made the initial complete system backup, it just started chugging away every hour making incremental backups.

When my computer crashed again on this last Monday, my first thought was wow, I'm up shit creek again (I had just done my taxes and I had not yet backed up the tax file for this last year). Then I remembered that Time Machine had been backing my system up and I went from feeling hopeless to cautiously guarded.

So I busted out the Leopard install dvd and started to restore my system from the Time Machine backup disk. First I reformatted my drive and wrote zeros over all sectors. Then I chose restore from Time Machine backup disk from the utilities menu and to my pleasant surprise, it worked flawlessly; at least as far as I could tell, my system was back exactly how it was the night before at ~6 pm. I opened a few programs, checked some files, it seemed like a perfect clone of the old disk. Just to make sure, I ran the disk utility and verified the disk--I got the green "Volume passed verification" result and was feeling pretty good about the system restore.

Then all of the trouble began. Not with the restored disk image, but with Time Machine. The first time Time Machine tried to resume making hourly backups, it failed. Second time, same result. It just couldn't seem to continue backing up to the backup disk that I was using before the system restore. I figured that maybe there was a problem trying to do backups to the disk that you had restored from, so I reformatted it and started from scratch. I got the same result after the format. The worst thing about the failure, is that Time Machine does not tell you why it failed, so you have no idea what to do to fix the problem.

I did a quick google search and discovered that Time Machine is quite buggy and there are lots of folks who have had similar problems with failed backups. I read just about every post on every discussion forum and have tried just about every suggestion that has been offered, including:

repairing permissions
reformatting the Time Machine backup disk (I even wrote zeros over all sectors)
hiding the Time Machine backup disk from spotlight
reseting the PRAM
trashing the Time Machine preferences
etc, etc...

After many attempts to let Time Machine resume backing up my system, I gave up and resorted to my old method for complete system backups. I downloaded the latest version of Carbon Copy Cloner, rebooted the MacBook Pro in target disk mode, and then plugged it into one of my other macs. The first time I tried to clone the drive, it failed. It just got hung when it tried to copy some disk images (.dmg) that were in my downloads folder. So I deleted the disk images from the downloads folder and retried. Second time I had success. The drive backed up perfectly. I verified the backup and it looks good. So now I at least have a complete system restore on a portable hard drive.

This whole experience has left me a little frustrated with the Time Machine feature of Leopard. On the one hand it got my system up and running very quickly and exactly where I left off. On the other hand, it has been a pain in the ass since restoring from the Time Machine backup. From everything I've read on the web,its clear that Time Machine is more than a little buggy and misses the mark by a mile as a hands off, no brains method to rely on for your complete system backups. I hope Apple is working hard to correct all the flaws of this ambitious feature.

Well, at the end of the day, I'm still not sure why my hard drive crashed again? Luckily I was able to restore it from the Time Machine backups. I leaves me wondering though if there is still something wrong with the integrity of the data on the drive because Time Machine cannot back it up now? Everything seems to check out okay, I guess only time will tell.

Cracked oil pan on the Rod Bender

Haven't been out fishing in what seems like quite some time. The weather has been good, the fishing has been crappy (from what I hear), and I've been very busy with my photography business.

I decided that in between photo shoots and other work that I would knock some boat maintenance out of the way in April. My buddy Tim and I decided to change the engine oil and the lower unit oil last week. We had an interesting day driving all over Guam to find everything we needed to do the maintenance, and then we spent about 2 hours doing the work. When it was all said and done, and we were cleaning up the mess, Tim noticed that the port motor was dripping a small amount of oil out of the oil drain tube. The plug was tight, but it still kept dripping.

We drained the new oil and put it back in the bottles and then took a look at the plug. The port motor on my boat has a brass plug in the oil pan instead of the regular plug. From what I have pieced together via the evidence left behind, the prior owner stripped the oil pan and then re-tapped it with a larger sized die and put in this brass plug. The problem with the brass plug is that it is prone to over tightening, because it does not have an integrated washer. I decided that I would replace the brass plug with a regular oil pan plug of the same size. So after visiting several NAPA auto parts stores here on Guam, I was able to locate an oil pan plug of the same size as the brass plug. When I tried to put the new plug in, the raised neck on the bottom of the oil pan cracked off. I think the oil pan cracked when i put the brass plug back in after the oil change, and that's why it was leaking. Then, when I put in the new plug, it completed the crack.

Unfortunately for me, the oil pan on an outboard motor is a lot harder to change out than on a car. The whole power-head and exhaust has to be removed and then rebuilt. I think its about 5-10 hours of labor + parts. The parts have to still be ordered. So I think its going to be a few weeks and many $$$ later until my boat is back in the water.

Brown Tree Snake

I had my first encounter with a Brown Tree Snake since moving to Guam. Andrew went out to get something from the truck and he came in and said, "Dad, there's a Brown Tree Snake on your truck." So I went out to check it out, and low and behold, there was a Brown Tree Snake on my truck. He was quickly dispatched with an oar and then beheaded with a machete.