Moving at the Speed of Creativity

After replacing my hard drive last night and starting the long process of reinstalling all my applications (since I purposely did NOT want to just restore them from a backup) I’m sorry to report an intermittent slowdown problem is persisting.
As you can see from the iStat menu graph below, which is accessible from my menu bar in the upper right corner of the screen, something is intermittently causing my CPU cycles to almost max out:

During these cycles, which last about 30 seconds, all windows move slowly and the entire computer system seems to be in slow motion. I wish I could explain this intermittent problem but I cannot with certainty. I had hoped that perhaps a software conflict was behind this issue and in re-installing my applications I’d avoid the problem. The problem resurfaced after I had only installed five new programs that were not included in the default Mac OS 10.5 application installation list, however. Now I am wondering if a hardware problem (but not the hard drive itself) could be to blame? Intermittent problems like this are the WORST to troubleshoot because they cannot be replicated reliably for others to see and examine. If I was on a Windows system I’d immediately suspect malware, but I haven’t heard of any “malware in the wild” for Mac OS X yet so that seems unlikely. I’m at a frustrated loss!

Is anyone else having strange intermittent slow-down problems on a Macbook? Mine is a first-generation MacBook, but the entire logic board has been replaced twice so it is literally like new. I did have this problem surface during an actual workshop presentation several weeks ago, which was a big hassle. I would love to resolve this problem without having to take my computer in again to meet with an Apple Store Mac Genius.

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macbook, slow, intermittent, slowdown

A couple of weeks ago I blogged about Roger Shank’s commercial website “Grandparent Games,” which permits grandparents to have digital, interactive play with a young grandchild when both are on high-speed Internet connections and are using webcams. About a week after I shared that post, our 4 year old’s Texas granddad called and asked if Rachel could get online and play some games with him, because he had configured an account on Grandparent Games and wanted to give it a try.

Rachel enjoyed interacting with Granddaddy on the site, and they probably played together for about twenty minutes. It is great to see a website like this which has been created for grandparent and grandchild interaction. I’m sure they will be logging on together again soon!

To login, we simply had to enter Granddaddy’s email address. He paid the monthly subscription fee (which is quite reasonable at $10 per month, and can be cancelled anytime) so we didn’t have to pay anything. In the photo below, Granddaddy is drawing something on the whiteboard and Rachel is trying to guess what it is:

The program can be used for “regular” desktop videoconferencing as well as playing games together. Rachel and grandmother were quite happy to just talk to one another over the website:

My need to interact once we got the website configured to use the iSight camera on our Macbook was minimal. Like UStream.tv, “Grandparent Games” requires that Macbook users select the USB-CAM option when choosing the iSight camera video source.

I sure wish I had been able to videoconference and have digital interactions with my grandparents when I was four years old. The world our children are growing up into is changing in basic ways before our very eyes. Our abilities to use digital technologies to maintain and strengthen our family relationships are only going to grow in power in the years ahead.

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grandparent, grandchild, game, online, videoconferencing, interaction, webcam, relationship, grandparentgames

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