A Cavalcade of Cascading Failures

Something went screwy with the micro SD card on my phone the other day, which meant I couldn't get to the apps installed on it, nor any of the docs or photos I'd saved to it (nothing incriminating, mind you).

My phone is over 2 years old and it basically out of memory, so it's about time for a new one. But I'll be damned if I'll be forced by a glitch to get one before I'm ready.

Doing some searching around suggested a few options, but first, I had to back up the card contents to my computer.

This is when things went sideways.

The card was a Samsung 8 gig micro SD card. (With more storage than my first four or so computers combined, on a card the size of my little finger  nail.) I put it in an adapter and stuck it in the built-in SD card slot on my MacBook Pro.

It didn't mount. That wasn't so good, but not unexpected. I tested another microSD card in the adapter, and that one didn't mount, so I figured it was a bad adapter.

I bought another micro SD card, mainly for the adapter. The new adapter didn't work. And neither did the brand-new card.

I tried the new card and adapter in a few different USB card readers. Those didn't work. So this was a completely different problem.

I went back to Google, and found a thread on the Apple Support Forums with a bunch of people facing similar problems: "MacBook Pro won't read Sandisk SDHC cards since Lion 10.7.1 update."

Blindly following the suggestions in the thread, I:

• Installed XQuartz
• Inserted the card and just waited. A few minutes later, I got a prompt saying the card was unreadable, asking if I wanted to reformat it in Disk Utility. As I wanted to back up the contents of the card, this was not an option.
• Fired up Parallels, to see if the card would mount under Windows 7. It didn't
• Zapped my PRAM
• Reset my SMC

After all this and countless reboots, I think the SMC reset did the trick, since the card mounted.

Now, I can actually get to working on the problem I was trying to get to in the first place.

Regardless, I'll probably still be trying to see if I can get a new phone out of this (I'm out from under my 2-year contract.)

On TV, women in distress cut their hair, while men in distress shave their heads. Here, I bridge the gap.

I went and did a thing today.

Light-headed.

I got a haircut. Normally, this wouldn't be a big deal, except I've been cultivating my quasi-mullet for many years, at least partially because I enjoyed tossing my luxuriously thick locks in the face of my largely balding peer-group competitors.

According to a generally pearl-clutching piece in Atlantic this week, women in distress on TV cut their hair. While it is sure that this trope is a thing, lamenting its existence ignores the fact that there are just as many examples of the male equivalent -- men in crisis shaving their heads (or, similarly, shaving their beards) -- in pop culture to render this gender-based complaint mostly moot.

Consider:

 

Taxi Driver's Robert DeNiro in mohawk mode

The Walking Dead's Shane closely shorn after a human sacrifice

In real-life, we have famous examples such as Britney Spears:

And Virginia Tech shooter Seung-Hui Cho.

Anyway, while there are things about my life that I'm evaluating, and while I am trying to reduce the amount of superfluous things, sometimes a haircut is just a haircut.