I spent a good portion of this morning in a creaky, drafty garage, attempting to make one good laser printer out of three. You never know what you’ll find when answering a Craigslist ad, which is why I always travel with tools, flashlight, cellphone, and the minimum amount of cash possible to hold an item until I’ve taken stock of the situation. These printers were three Phaser 7700 models, big tabloid-sized laser printers bought at a GSA auction and stored for several years behind a surplus hospital gurney covered in books and old Silicon Graphics workstations. Between the three of them there were two full sets of ink cartridges, one set of fusers, and one working hard drive (the other two had been pulled as per government regulations), and after swapping parts around, finagling balky fusers into place and doing delicate transplant surgery on the motherboards, we got one to power up and make it to the “print test page” step before paper jams and my ice-cold feet brought us to a halt. I don’t think these three machines were worth purchasing, but I’m still keeping my eyes open.
Six dropped calls in the last two weeks means your network, while fast, sucks. While talking on the phone with my sister this evening, I got dropped twice. WTF? The church steeple across the street from my house is built out of cellular repeaters. Your responses to customer complaints about the quality and coverage of your network leave much to be desired; in fact, they are the reason I will be dropping your service as soon as your iPhone exclusivity contract expires with Apple. Get bent.
I’d be more exited about the news that Soundgarden is reuniting if it was circa Louder Than Love Soundgarden, not Superunknown Soundgarden. Oh, well.
I only just got Snow Leopard from Santa over the holidays (thanks, Santa!), so I’m behind the curve as far as what’s new and what it does. One thing I was not aware of was that Apple was removing Appletalk support altogether, which means no more direct printing to either of our printers—something I wasn’t aware of when I upgraded my laptop last week. Thankfully, it’s an easy fix: I set up Shared Printing on our G5 server (which can’t run Snow Leopard anyway) and all was right again.