Doug's Dynamic Drivel

As some of you may know Diane has an iMac. She loves it, I hate it. I don’t find OS X at all intuitive and some things drive me absolutely right around the bend bat shit crazy. Things like wtf does iPhoto store the damn photos? Same with iTunes. It’s hard to find the folder they are in. In any case I don’t have to deal; with that stuff too often as Diane is getting much better at solving problems herself (I’m proud of you dear) but this past weekend really set a new bar for me in frustration with iMacs. The XKCD cartoon above is very appropos.

As you most likely know the CD/DVD player is a vertical slot on the side. To load it you simply push a CD/DVD into the slot opening and the system grabs it and pulls it in. When finished it ejects it and there is also an eject button on the keyboard as well as various other commands available from the CLI etc to do the same thing.

Well Diane has a bunch of new art work (patience we are working on getting it up on her site) and a friend took digital pictures of the paintings this weekend. He brought them over on a thumb drive and for some reason he could not get her iMac to read that drive. Now he’s a Mac user himself so there shouldn’t have been a problem since he copied the files from his Mac to the thumb drive. In any case he gave me the drive and I plugged it into my Vista box and burned the relevant contents to an Imation DVD +R 16x (RW) and gave it to him to load on Diane’s iMac. Therein begins the tale of woe.

The damn piece of crap from Apple would not only not read the DVD but it would not eject it either. Between our friend and myself we tried about a dozen different methods of getting the damn thing to eject a perfectly good DVD (i. e. it wasn’t warped). We tried everything suggested on every Mac forum we could find. Nothing worked. Now where we live there isn’t an authorized Mac technician within ~350km (220mi) but there is one guy an hours drive away that might be able to as long as it isn’t under warranty (which it isn’t). I was all ready to pack it up on Sunday and drive up to Nelson and get it foxed when I did one last search and after reading about a gazillion or two responses in a chat room found one suggestion that, in the end, actually worked. Take a piece of cardboard (like off the back of a notepad or a package of batteries) and fold it in two lengthwise. You’ll need about 4 to 6 inches in length. Turn the iMac off. Insert the cardboard into the CD/DVD drive slot and push in until it stops (don’t be too forceful.) Now turn on the iMac and slightly twist the cardboard to put pressure on the disc that won’t come out. As the iMac boots it will try and read from the disk and it will end up ejecting it.

It’s really a case of very, very poor design. The aftermarket burn your own discs have a tendency to be a very fine hair width thinner than the commercial disks and because of that, and the fact that they are sitting vertical where they can not rely on gravity to keep it where it needs to be, the after market disks can slip a bit and not be engaged properly by the player mechanism. The fact that they went with form over function and compounded that error with a poorly engineered mechanism tells me all I need to know about the crap quality of Macs (and no I don’t give a damn about how good they are at graphical design or videos etc.)

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