[About Me]
05 February 2009
Routine Surgery Turned Into Butchery
--Warning: The following couple of paragraphs are fairly geeky discussion of some issues upgrading my Macbook harddrive, feel free to skip over this section--
I upgraded my Macbook's harddrive from the original 60 GB capacity to 320 GB capacity (the last of the upgrades I can make on the now almost 3 year laptop), and what I had expected to be a simple and relatively fast upgrade (fairly 'routine surgery') turned into a messy process leaving 2 screws, 2 unkown plastic pieces, and 1 rubber piece behind. My understanding of the process was that I simply had to pop the battery out, take the 2 screws out that cover the RAM (previously upgraded--twice) and harddrive off and then pull the tab of the old harddrive out before popping the new harddrive in. Up until that point, everything went well. Then, when I went to take the EMI (the electro-magnetic shield that protects the harddrive's logic board) cover off the old harddrive to put it on the new one, I discovered that the cover was fasted by torx screws (and I don't keep a torx screwdriver around). Not to be defeated, I used a flathead screwdriver to fairly easily remove 2 of the screws on the cover before stripping the other two screws and then forcibly pulling the EMI cover off of those 2 remaining screws. I put the cover onto the new harddrive (fasting it with just the 2 screws I was able to get) and tried popping it back in. No good. I tried forcing it back in, no good. I tried adjusting the EMI cover (which was dented on one side). No good. I pulled the dented portion of the EMI cover back off. No good. And so on and so forth. Then I finally gave up and tried using the original harddrive again. That wouldn't go back in either, so I FINALLY shown a light into the harddrive cavity and discovered a piece of rubber in the way--I tried sticking a thin object inside to grab it but it was too far back. To fially jump this story to the end, I wound up taking the entire top case of my MacBook off in order to get at the piece of rubber and get the harddrive in. I then hastily put it all back together (which is how I would up with the 2 plastic pieces that fell out of it and I have no idea where the 2 screws came from). Still, everything works and I now have a much beefier harddrive capable of storing the videos from my studies (no more need to lug around an external drive and find a power outlet for both it and my laptop). So what I had planned 1, 2 hours TOPS for ended up taking me probably about 6 hours (including a final Timemachine backup and restoring the new drive from the Timemachine backup).
Plus, my personal backup drive (250 GB) ended up getting a fried logic board, so I had double reason for upgrading my harddrive--I'd fix the old backup but apparently the WesternDigital harddrive I had stores unique information on the platters so even swapping the logic board with one from the same model and firmware is unlikely to fix it.
So that's my geeky story, probably not worth a blog post, but I just wanted to warn people that the 'ease of swapping' harddrives on the MacBook may not be as easy as you've probably heard. Although, to be fair, if the little piece of rubber had not fallen off of wherever it fell off then the process would have been mostly painless (getting around the torx screws with a flathead was mostly painless).
--Non-geeky portion of the post starts here--
In running my studies of the ConvoCon interface for multitouch devices, I have begun pondering our constant drive toward efficiency and task focus. Until I changed my procedures for the study, I found people were so obsessed with trying complete the tangram puzzles that they ignored the ConvoCons popping up in the middle of the screen (they'd rotate and appear in different colors each time) and participants (working on completing the same pattern) would say hardly a word to one another unless they found themselves working separately on the same puzzle with the wrong solution in mind. This probably shouldn't have surprised me as much as it did since I've always been in at least one discipline where one of the primary goals is a drive toward efficiency (computer science is really big on efficient algorithms and traditional HCI is all about making interfaces 'more usable' which is focused on reducing the number of steps necessary and overall making this more efficient). Still, when I think 'puzzle' I think of something 'fun' and 'social', not a single-minded slant toward completion as fast as possible. It was interesting, too, because when some high school students came in for a tour I had them do a 'moxperiment' (mock experiment) and they behaved as I expected--one person got the riddle/joke question and the other got the answer (the person with the answer would cover it up as they tried to figure it out). The ConvoCons then became something in addition to the main task that they were able to 'bond' over. Since adding the 'play time' before the puzzle start, participants now respond to the ConvoCons and seem to use it as a way of breaking the awkwardness of working with somebody they don't know (several of the groups without ConvoCons actually end the 'play time' early and stare at me in the awkwardness until I ask them if they want to move on to the first pattern, but I tend to have to end the 'play time' for the ConvoCon groups and move them on to the first pattern). I'm hoping to run an experiment to explore this phenomenon of 'task focus' more in the future (I need to do more of a lit review on it, as I'm sure there's a decent amount out there) but generally it's been a lesson learned for me in setting up social experiments that are not as fully rigid as I'm used to with more cognitively/task based experiments--with these the ConvoCons the task was really intended to be secondary. As I get into analyzing the data, I may add more insights into some of my observations and thoughts.
Aside from running the studies, things have been fairly busy with classes--I'm in two sociology theory courses and one social research methods course, so a decent heavy course load. I have added links to my blogs for my classic sociological theory course on the right side of the main page (Sociology 506 Blog and L.F. Ward Blog). The Ward page may change more into an actual web site as I'm not entirely sure it 'works' as a blog. I've also narrowed down the readings for the HCI course I'll be teaching this summer assuming all the paperwork goes through.
In other news, my CHI works-in-progress posted ended up being rejected (like the Note, they liked the idea but wanted more detailed data analysis--I thought as a works-in-progress poster that full analysis wasn't needed). I think I already mentioned that both submissions to HCII were accepted (I'm also a student volunteer for HCII, so I should be almost completely funded). I'm also hoping to do a decent analysis of the data from this study and submit something to UIST. I'm still hoping to try to find a sociology venue to submit something to as well.
I upgraded my Macbook's harddrive from the original 60 GB capacity to 320 GB capacity (the last of the upgrades I can make on the now almost 3 year laptop), and what I had expected to be a simple and relatively fast upgrade (fairly 'routine surgery') turned into a messy process leaving 2 screws, 2 unkown plastic pieces, and 1 rubber piece behind. My understanding of the process was that I simply had to pop the battery out, take the 2 screws out that cover the RAM (previously upgraded--twice) and harddrive off and then pull the tab of the old harddrive out before popping the new harddrive in. Up until that point, everything went well. Then, when I went to take the EMI (the electro-magnetic shield that protects the harddrive's logic board) cover off the old harddrive to put it on the new one, I discovered that the cover was fasted by torx screws (and I don't keep a torx screwdriver around). Not to be defeated, I used a flathead screwdriver to fairly easily remove 2 of the screws on the cover before stripping the other two screws and then forcibly pulling the EMI cover off of those 2 remaining screws. I put the cover onto the new harddrive (fasting it with just the 2 screws I was able to get) and tried popping it back in. No good. I tried forcing it back in, no good. I tried adjusting the EMI cover (which was dented on one side). No good. I pulled the dented portion of the EMI cover back off. No good. And so on and so forth. Then I finally gave up and tried using the original harddrive again. That wouldn't go back in either, so I FINALLY shown a light into the harddrive cavity and discovered a piece of rubber in the way--I tried sticking a thin object inside to grab it but it was too far back. To fially jump this story to the end, I wound up taking the entire top case of my MacBook off in order to get at the piece of rubber and get the harddrive in. I then hastily put it all back together (which is how I would up with the 2 plastic pieces that fell out of it and I have no idea where the 2 screws came from). Still, everything works and I now have a much beefier harddrive capable of storing the videos from my studies (no more need to lug around an external drive and find a power outlet for both it and my laptop). So what I had planned 1, 2 hours TOPS for ended up taking me probably about 6 hours (including a final Timemachine backup and restoring the new drive from the Timemachine backup).
Plus, my personal backup drive (250 GB) ended up getting a fried logic board, so I had double reason for upgrading my harddrive--I'd fix the old backup but apparently the WesternDigital harddrive I had stores unique information on the platters so even swapping the logic board with one from the same model and firmware is unlikely to fix it.
So that's my geeky story, probably not worth a blog post, but I just wanted to warn people that the 'ease of swapping' harddrives on the MacBook may not be as easy as you've probably heard. Although, to be fair, if the little piece of rubber had not fallen off of wherever it fell off then the process would have been mostly painless (getting around the torx screws with a flathead was mostly painless).
--Non-geeky portion of the post starts here--
In running my studies of the ConvoCon interface for multitouch devices, I have begun pondering our constant drive toward efficiency and task focus. Until I changed my procedures for the study, I found people were so obsessed with trying complete the tangram puzzles that they ignored the ConvoCons popping up in the middle of the screen (they'd rotate and appear in different colors each time) and participants (working on completing the same pattern) would say hardly a word to one another unless they found themselves working separately on the same puzzle with the wrong solution in mind. This probably shouldn't have surprised me as much as it did since I've always been in at least one discipline where one of the primary goals is a drive toward efficiency (computer science is really big on efficient algorithms and traditional HCI is all about making interfaces 'more usable' which is focused on reducing the number of steps necessary and overall making this more efficient). Still, when I think 'puzzle' I think of something 'fun' and 'social', not a single-minded slant toward completion as fast as possible. It was interesting, too, because when some high school students came in for a tour I had them do a 'moxperiment' (mock experiment) and they behaved as I expected--one person got the riddle/joke question and the other got the answer (the person with the answer would cover it up as they tried to figure it out). The ConvoCons then became something in addition to the main task that they were able to 'bond' over. Since adding the 'play time' before the puzzle start, participants now respond to the ConvoCons and seem to use it as a way of breaking the awkwardness of working with somebody they don't know (several of the groups without ConvoCons actually end the 'play time' early and stare at me in the awkwardness until I ask them if they want to move on to the first pattern, but I tend to have to end the 'play time' for the ConvoCon groups and move them on to the first pattern). I'm hoping to run an experiment to explore this phenomenon of 'task focus' more in the future (I need to do more of a lit review on it, as I'm sure there's a decent amount out there) but generally it's been a lesson learned for me in setting up social experiments that are not as fully rigid as I'm used to with more cognitively/task based experiments--with these the ConvoCons the task was really intended to be secondary. As I get into analyzing the data, I may add more insights into some of my observations and thoughts.
Aside from running the studies, things have been fairly busy with classes--I'm in two sociology theory courses and one social research methods course, so a decent heavy course load. I have added links to my blogs for my classic sociological theory course on the right side of the main page (Sociology 506 Blog and L.F. Ward Blog). The Ward page may change more into an actual web site as I'm not entirely sure it 'works' as a blog. I've also narrowed down the readings for the HCI course I'll be teaching this summer assuming all the paperwork goes through.
In other news, my CHI works-in-progress posted ended up being rejected (like the Note, they liked the idea but wanted more detailed data analysis--I thought as a works-in-progress poster that full analysis wasn't needed). I think I already mentioned that both submissions to HCII were accepted (I'm also a student volunteer for HCII, so I should be almost completely funded). I'm also hoping to do a decent analysis of the data from this study and submit something to UIST. I'm still hoping to try to find a sociology venue to submit something to as well.
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