Wow. Apparently, somehow, an album of vintage live La’s recordings was just released. Pitchfork gives it an 8.1, comparing it (unfairly, probably) to their ’90 studio release. The band’s chief songwriter is brilliant, perfectionist, reclusive, and unstable, so this is a nice surprise. More information, via Wikipedia.
I spent almost the entire weekend nose-deep in various laptops, attempting to get one or all of them to wake up and tango again. My first patient was a client’s 700mhz iBook, which had stopped booting up after sleeping down its battery to empty. After spending an hour attempting the various revivification techniques, I called it dead and got the OK to pull the hard drive. Apparently this was the most complicated, difficult model Apple ever designed, because it took two hours, three different websites, a package of bamboo shish kebab sticks, and a lot of patience to crack the case. Once I’d gotten it out, it was a no-brainer to slap in an external drive, and the files appeared normally.
The second patient was a $40 Powerbook 1400 I got off Craigslist for reasons I still can’t explain entirely; it has something to do with having a working OS 9 machine that doesn’t take up half a desk’s worth of space. (I own a Powerbook 100, which is essentially a Mac Plus, for the same reason.) It came with an ethernet PCMCIA card, and I’ve got a compatible wireless card scavenged from a dead AirPort Base Station, but the complicating factor is that this unit came with a floppy drive and no built-in Ethernet. The version of OS 9 on the disk is faulty and it won’t load the PC card drivers to activate ethernet or wireless. I don’t have a SCSI CD drive anymore (my No More Beige rule is skirted by the fact that these laptops are all Powerbook Black) and Apple stopped shipping OS installs on floppies back in the OS 8 days. So I pulled the hard drive and spent hours attempting to install a fresh copy of OS 9.1 on it via a FireWire enclosure, but the 9.1 update kept hanging, resulting in an incomplete System Folder and a flashing disk icon at boot.
I hate it when I can’t solve a problem on my own.
So I’m going to borrow a SCSI CD drive from a client down the street and see if I can get this @$*!&! thing to install. Then, providing it works, I’m going to get the wireless working and set it up as a support machine to run all the OS 9 apps I still use (PhotoVista being the latest in a long line.)
Finally, I set up Jen’s father’s new laptop to work with his wireless network, installed Office, and made sure his email was set up correctly. Vista seems nice, but at first blush, there are a lot of useless bells and whistles that get in the way of what I want to do. I’m happy I’m still running XP here.
For now, I have a small mountain of obsolete Apple iron beside my desk, waiting for some non-billable time I can waste making old things useful again.
Update: No luck. DRAT!
Update Update:This link doesn’t really help much (I want OS 9, not OS 7) but I’m wondering if I can connect it via SCSI disk mode and install from another Mac (My B/W G3 here has Ultra-Wide SCSI, which means I’d need to score a MiniD68 to DB25 cable somewhere—an expensive proposition, most likely) but it’s hard finding any documentation on this. Also, it looks like drives above 4GB aren’t supported on the 1400, which dorks that avenue. So I’m back to an internal CD drive on eBay.
The Disease of Design. I am ashamed to admit I suffer from this affliction. (The link made me snort my coffee through my nose.)
Here’s a mathematically proven formula for taking blink-free group photos. “For groups smaller than 20, divide the number of people by three if there’s good light and two if the light’s bad”. Who says math isn’t fun? (via)
Apple technote 50959:When a portable Mac won’t start up. Resetting the PRAM; How to identify iBook models. (I have a client with an iBook that appears to be taking a dirt nap.)
From The Consumerist, 14 Secrets from a former HP Employee. As if I didn’t already have enough reasons not to buy an HP printer. Number One illustrates perfectly the amount of contempt and corporate malice that the company projects.
Because we’re all about the romance here at Idiot Central, we scheduled the most tender and heartwarming of appointments for this, the special day of love and affection: a tax meeting with our CPA. And because the Sky Pilot is not without a sense of humor and irony, he/she decided to schedule a “wintry mix” of undetermined amount, duration, an consistency, ensuring that every chucklehead with low-profile tires and a fart-can muffler will be out spinning their tires with willful abandon.
Thanks Martha!
Now, normally we are all about the snowdays, choosing to spend them on the couch with a cup of tea and a “Flip This House” marathon, but we’ve been looking forward to this particular day with a wintry mixture of fear and hope. All large-ticket purchases have been put on indeterminate hold until we find out what we owe The Man, and because the self-employed businessperson’s taxes are equal parts logic and santeria, we’re a little concerned that we’re going to have to auction off some internal organs to pay for 2006.
Jen and I have spent hours compliling our paperwork, and she has hers neatly catalogued on a crisp sheet of business letterhead in a clean folder, while mine are listed in a plain Excel spreadsheet and paper-clipped to a wad of crumpled receipts (infer what you will here about our individual methods of organization.) Our CPA, a cheerful woman who has been wrestling with sorting my personal finances out since my college days, told us to email the relevant info to her and then set up a conference call to get the basic numbers figured out instead of braving the roads. That’s service.
Meanwhile, lest you think the Idiot is a thoughtless cad, I made plans for us to see The Baltimore Opera’s production of the Bartered Bride in March, which is something Jen’s been wanting to do forever. The plot of this opera is a bit convoluted, so we’re unclear as to exactly what will be happening, but I was assured we will enjoy a clear view of the translated subtitles—a requirement, as the opera will be performed in Czech. (Nothing says romance like Czech.) We will get dressed up in our finest threads, have an elegant dinner before the show, and enjoy a complimentary glass of champagne at the Brass Elephant after the production. In the meantime, I will be lavishing my bride with homemade grilled cheese sandwiches and warm soup until I can dig out the Jeep and buy her some fresh flowers.
Happy Valentine’s Day, baby.
Update: w00t! We’re (at least, right now) reasonably sure we don’t owe millions to the gub’mint! Thank GOD.
I stumbled on this old link about window sash balances, which are spring-loaded pulleys that replace counterweights so that the weight pocket can be filled and insulated for winter weather. Our windows are drafty, and I believe that once they are properly insulated we would save a ton of money in heating bills. Now, to weigh one of our windows and order…
Due to an unexplainable error, I wasn’t getting email updates when comments were posted here. After cleaning up and rebuilding some templates, resetting some preferences, and turning off HTML in the comments, I’m hoping I can catch more of the spam before it shows up.
Also, I’m trying out the addition of dates over here on the left. But because IE/PC is a sucktastic piece of shit, it’s not looking right there when it looks good everywhere else.