Update 5 pm. This tower is running smoothly, and the Powerbook has a new lease on life. To my peeps who have Pismos (*cough* Rob and Dave *cough*), you gotta upgrade. It’s like having a whole new Powerbook.
Update 3:34 pm. Looks like (knock, knock) everything went smoothly and well. All my stuff is where it should be; I enabled journaling on my existing partition seamlessly, chose the “Archive and Install” option, and crossed my fingers as it started. 30 minutes later, I’m checking email, loading the updates, and it looks almost exactly the same.
One drawback about Panther is that it looks like ATM under Classic, the benchmark font utility, does not pass open font info along to Panther, so I have to use the OSX version of Suitcase. Sigh.
I’m offline for a few hours while I upgrade the Pismo to OSX 10.3. Wish me luck.
Great News. Looks like Hellboy is getting good reviews around the net this morning, which makes me very happy. I think the books are some of the most expressive, beautiful comics I’ve ever seen, and the stories only make them better. I think Jen and I may go see it this weekend (she doesn’t know that yet.)
Not So Great News. Unfortunately, we may have to walk: the transmission in the Taurus was giving me fits this morning. I merged on to the Beltway, and while I couldn’t hear anything over the sound of the rain, traffic, and radio, my Spidey-sense noticed that the engine was rumbling in a different way—I was still in first gear doing 55mph. I pulled over, shut it down, and re-started the engine, and that seemed to help, but the wonderful clunk of shifting into gear is getting more and more noticable each day.
There’s a great quote on the second track of Psyence Fiction by UNKLE: the beat slows, and you hear someone say “There were too many of us, we had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little, we went insane.” I found out last night reading an article on Lawrence Fishburne in last week’s New Yorker that the speaker was Francis Ford Coppola, describing US involvement in Vietnam. Pardon me for stating the obvious, but….
So, in case the wedding invitations were still a little oblique for some of you, here’s some more information about the bug on the cover.
I don’t have any kind of snarky joke to play on you folks; let it be known that I would have a sense of humor if I had more time.
This is a very nice site for all my mid-century modern peeps out there: Meteor Lights features lamps and shades from the 50’s for the modern bohemian. (via Boing Boing)
Money. Jen and I have been in the middle of a bureaucratic nightmare with Baltimore Gas and Electric since we first opened the door to our new house. It involved the last vestigal traces of an operational doctor’s office after they hauled the desk, waiting room chairs, miniature skeleton, and filing cabinets out of the front rooms: two electrical meters bolted to the basement wall, clicking merrily away on commercial rates. The sellers graciously offered to have it converted to a single service, and footed the bill—a quiet man named Ben came and wrestled the rat’s nest of Eisenhower-era wiring into a single, beautiful panel with about fifteen empty slots, signed the work order, and disappeared into the warm October afternoon like Robert DeNiro in Brazil.
Since then, we’ve battled the faceless drones at BG&E to get two bills consolidated into one, which has involved repeated visits from representatives of the company, a three-month wait for somebody to hook up the outside service (while the HUGE main feed wire into the house hung loose at the bottom of the basement steps, promising swift death to anybody brushing up against it with a laundry basket), another wait for somebody to finish the job inside, then an inspection, then another inspection to make sure we aren’t using the house commercially to grow pot (that’s what the greenhouse is for), and then a call to a drone to actually consolidate the bills.
The sum of this lovely exercise came today: $675 in current and backdated charges for gas and electric. Kinda makes that check I just wrote for $1.43 for the water bill look that much better.