A Fun New Acquaintance, and Why I Love My Mac, part 2 - 10:17 am Kolkata time, 8/24/2005
OSX has the standard UNIX tools for dealing with file systems and devices, and can mount just about any sort of disk, file system, etc. It also deals extremely well with network self-configuration and discovery— i.e., you can plug it into just about any ethernet anywhere, and reasonably expect to be able to do computer-to-computer file transfers quickly and without any pain. These attributes in handy when a Yugoslavian airline pilot wants help copying his collection of bootlegged Yugoslavian classic films off of the damaged DVD-ROM they're burned to.
Before you ask, yes, this situation came up last night. As I was writing the previous post— in fact, just as I was typing the bit about not seeing very many Europeans in the hotel, and how most of the ones we saw were somehow affiliated with an airline— I heard a voice asking me, in a heavy Eastern-European accent, "Excuse me, your laptop is also havink Combo Drive?".
The voice turned out to belong to Aleksandar, a friendly Yugoslavian somewhere between forty and sixty years old. He's an airline pilot, and is on a one-year contract flying for a domestic Indian airline. When he's not flying, they put him up at the Kolkata Hyatt. The last time he was in Yugoslavia, he had a friend burn him DVD-ROMs containing bootleg DivX transfers of one or two dozen classic Yugoslavian films from the 1970's and 1980's. Something had gone awry with about half of the discs, and the discs were unreadable on his Windows XP laptop. They show up in Nero's "Disc Info" screen as having a track and session recorded, but they are unmountable. On my Mac, however, they appeared almost entirely without complaint (one of the discs required a little bit of finangling with the Disk Utility).
Once we verified that the files were intact, it was just a matter of copying them over. Neither of us had a crossover cable, so we had to use the hotel's "Business Center". A simple matter of plugging in our laptops to the hotel LAN, setting up "Windows File Sharing" in my System Preferences, and we were off like a shot. Of course, it took a long time to copy, so we were up until about two in the morning. I got to hear all about what it's like flying for an Indian airline. Apparently, the industry is in very good shape, so the fleets are relatively new. The only problem, he said, was that they didn't have any kind of automated scheduling system for deciding who got which flights, so the pilots had to spend a good bit of time sweet-talking the gal who handled the scheduling in order to get the flights they wanted.
Once we were done copying the files, Aleksandar was so grateful that he tried to drag me down to the hotel bar— at two in the morning, mind you— for some beers. I told him that I would have to take a rain check, as I had to work the next day. He then suggested that I head out to the airport with him the next day, as he was taking a new pilot up for some flight training and he could take me along, too. Even more reluctantly, I had to take another rain check— as much as I would have loved to take the day off and go flying, our time here is limited enough that I'm not reallly able to randomly and spontaneously take the time off.
Before you ask, yes, this situation came up last night. As I was writing the previous post— in fact, just as I was typing the bit about not seeing very many Europeans in the hotel, and how most of the ones we saw were somehow affiliated with an airline— I heard a voice asking me, in a heavy Eastern-European accent, "Excuse me, your laptop is also havink Combo Drive?".
The voice turned out to belong to Aleksandar, a friendly Yugoslavian somewhere between forty and sixty years old. He's an airline pilot, and is on a one-year contract flying for a domestic Indian airline. When he's not flying, they put him up at the Kolkata Hyatt. The last time he was in Yugoslavia, he had a friend burn him DVD-ROMs containing bootleg DivX transfers of one or two dozen classic Yugoslavian films from the 1970's and 1980's. Something had gone awry with about half of the discs, and the discs were unreadable on his Windows XP laptop. They show up in Nero's "Disc Info" screen as having a track and session recorded, but they are unmountable. On my Mac, however, they appeared almost entirely without complaint (one of the discs required a little bit of finangling with the Disk Utility).
Once we verified that the files were intact, it was just a matter of copying them over. Neither of us had a crossover cable, so we had to use the hotel's "Business Center". A simple matter of plugging in our laptops to the hotel LAN, setting up "Windows File Sharing" in my System Preferences, and we were off like a shot. Of course, it took a long time to copy, so we were up until about two in the morning. I got to hear all about what it's like flying for an Indian airline. Apparently, the industry is in very good shape, so the fleets are relatively new. The only problem, he said, was that they didn't have any kind of automated scheduling system for deciding who got which flights, so the pilots had to spend a good bit of time sweet-talking the gal who handled the scheduling in order to get the flights they wanted.
Once we were done copying the files, Aleksandar was so grateful that he tried to drag me down to the hotel bar— at two in the morning, mind you— for some beers. I told him that I would have to take a rain check, as I had to work the next day. He then suggested that I head out to the airport with him the next day, as he was taking a new pilot up for some flight training and he could take me along, too. Even more reluctantly, I had to take another rain check— as much as I would have loved to take the day off and go flying, our time here is limited enough that I'm not reallly able to randomly and spontaneously take the time off.
posted by steve | 10:34 AM
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