Wesley's Tool-Box

This morning saw Apple announcing the first official Macintosh computers with Intel CPU such as the MacBook Pro. These machines come with OS X 10.4.4 for Intel, and Apple updated the PPC version of OS X to the same version. I downloaded the update and ran it... and the system wouldn't boot anymore.

The keyboard commands to force booting to the optical drive refused to work, so I had to take the Mac mini apart, physically remove the hard disk, and force it to boot from the OS X install DVD. After that, I set the boot drive to the optical drive, turned the system off, reassembled it back to the way it was, and started installing OS X 10.4 from scratch. Using the archive-and-install option, the old installation was saved for later recovery of data.

I had been thinking of visiting United States for a while. There were relatives and friends I could visit. I might also attend some trade shows. Alas, my U.S. visa expired over a decade ago, and Korea still isn't under the visa exemption program for United States. After all those years of missing out, I decided to get it over with and get a U.S. visa recently. It was a bit of work, but I decided to do this on my own instead of letting an agency take care of it.