Archive for August, 2010

Ping G15 Driver

Sunday, August 8th, 2010

Field tested the G15 driver yesterday. It feels good.

Compared to the Nike Sumo square 5900, the G15 swings more in balance and allows me to put more muscle on it. It feeds back a satisfying “PING” compared to the Nike’s as loud but deader “quack” sound when I hit the right spot. When hitting off center, the Nike is noticeably more forgiving due to the MOI maximizing design. But as I’m learning to control my driver swing better, I appreciate the more sensitive feedback G15 gives me. It feels more like the BMW chassis than the Lincoln – it quiets most of the harshness but still gives you just enough feedback to allow you drive better over time.

And the length. While I haven’t mastered the new driver yet (only one round and one range test session under belt), it is definitely longer than the Nike on the course. I was able to out-drive the partners with an average driving day  more often than even a good day with the old Nike.

Confidence is the most important thing in Golf. Aside from all the technical features you can read elsewhere, the more traditional yet quite muscular head appearance definitely gives you more confidence. That is what marred the Nike square head. When I told the guy at the pro shop what driver I had, his first words were: “So you want a more traditional looking driver.”  QED

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Reinstall OS X

Sunday, August 8th, 2010

Now that the magic of Apple has fallen to the normal level, I also found out that my 24-inch aluminum iMac has accumulated some bad jojo over the last 3 years. Ahh, the good old ritual of reinstall Windows every a couple years. Come to think about it, Microsoft is really the progenitor of so many current high-tech successors. Sooner or later, they find in their gene map bits of bad code granddaddy put in. First it is Yahoo, then Apple, and pretty soon Google too.

Now back to the current task at hand. The problem is that my Snow Leopard keeps dropping internet connections and gets really sluggish compared to the Windows 7 laptop sitting next to it. Since it is a slow progression, it can only be attributed to aging but not any particular incident. Searching online yielded no quick fixes but the clean install options popped up a few times. So I thought it is show-time for a real test of Time Machine.

First attempt: boldly wiping out hard disk and have a clean install of Snow Leopard. It detected the attached Time Machine hard drive and asked whether I wanted to import from it. Sure, give it go. Everything restored beautifully – all the applications including 3rd-party ones, all my iPhoto files (100+GB of them!) and everything else. However, so does the internet slowness. Well, I should have thought about that – the time machine is so faithful it essentially gives me the exact same machine back.

Second attempt: same steps of clean install but declined the time machine option. Now I’m opting a manual restore by carefully choosing what I restore. Nothing from the system folders please. New users, fresh software re-install. So far so good. It did give me some permission problems as Mac thinks the new Me is somehow different from the Me created those Time Machine backups. Certain folder works when I override with admin password, some folder is less lenient. Thank goodness the gigantic iPhoto and iTune folders are fine – I really don’t want to copy 100,000 files by hand.

So far so good. We will see in a few days whether the internet connection problem comes back or not. Stay tuned, if you are interested.

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