February 28, 2007

It Is Alive

Last night, after much wrangling, reading, dissecting, and cursing, I finally got a working copy of OS 9.1 on my Powerbook 1400. Bored readers may recall that I was having problems because the machine didn't come with a CD-ROM drive, so anything I was installing internally had to come on floppy discs. Thus, a long process of pulling the hard drive and putting it in a FireWire enclosure, then swapping it back into the machine or testing began, always resulting in a flashing floppy icon (OS 9 speak for "I can't find a System Folder.")

Last night I finally had my eureka moment: for whatever reason, after installing the OS, the system folder wasn't "blessed", and therefore not viable. I read up on blessing system folders and followed the proper proceedure while booted into OS 9 on my old blue and white tower, and then swapped out the drive one last time: Success!

After that, it was frighteningly easy to get it on my wireless network: I have an old Lucent silver card pulled from a dead AirPort Base Station, and Proxim still has working drivers (behind a login/password, unfortunately) that install quickly and painlessly—I was up and running in minutes. Because it's a newer, larger hard drive, response time is much zippier.

Pageloads are painfully slow, but I wasn't expecting lightning speed. My MacBook Pro can see the drive when it's shared and I can dump files on it (Photoshop 3! Illustrator 5.5! Streamline 4!) so that it can back up my emulated copy of OS 8.5 here on the MBP. I have yet to test out webmail or Movable Type yet, but that's coming.

I have a perverse love for old electronics, and an even stranger love for fixing them. This old Powerbook was giving me fits because every ninja method I tried to get around its limitations (and believe me, I was ninja) failed for some reason or another. I'd all but given up on it until some spare brain cells began firing in a different way, and once I'd given it some time and thought, a simpler, easier solution presented itself. One of the hardest lessons I've had to learn as I've grown older is to be patient and wait for solutions to percolate, instead of rushing ahead and getting myself into more trouble down the line: I was the kid who put my plastic models together way too fast because I wanted to play with them NOW, not wait for the stupid glue to dry. This seems to be my M.O. as I get older, from everything to mantle construction to website building to illustration concepting— a little time, patience, and waiting for the tinkering part of my brain to come up with alternate solution usually pays off in the end.

Posted on February 28, 2007 8:25 AM | link to this entry

February 26, 2007

Snowy Cardinal

Yep, more snow. We celebrated by having steamed mussels and homemade cornbread.

Posted on February 26, 2007 8:45 AM | link to this entry

February 22, 2007

Tulips

One of my favorite things about late winter and early spring is fresh tulips.

Posted on February 22, 2007 3:43 PM | link to this entry

Don't Get Involved.

I'm struggling to figure out what bothers me most about this news item. Go read it and come back.

OK, so you have the basics. Here are my issues.

I'm troubled by the fact that the cops are charging him for this; this makes me think of the Kitty Genovese story, and the don't get involved mindset many people have in these litigous times. I'm actually kind of happy the guy ran upstairs to see what was going on; as I was telling Jen, I'd probably grab whatever was handy (baseball bat, 2x4, steak knife) and do the same thing myself.

I'm a little wierded out by the guy, though. His eyeballs in that mugshot say "tweaker", but that could just be me. The fact that he's 39 and living with his mother is a little Norman Bates-ish, too.

That must have been some kind of pr0n to warrant that kind of response. Usually it's pretty easy to tell by sound what's going on, but the actress must have really been convincing. (is that wrong of me to say?)

It's kind of sad that the guy who tried to do right gets popped and winds up on CNN, while the guy watching the movie remains "the neighbor". Everyone inside the bustling metropolis of Oconomowoc, Wisconsin probably knows who the guy is, but to the rest of us he is a mystery. (Jen sez they had the guy's name and picture written in that article earlier today, but it's gone now. Hmmm.)

Antique sword. Lives with Mom. 39 years old. Not clued in on the sounds of a woman in distress/pleasure. Any red flags coming up for anyone else besides me?

Sucks for that guy, to be sure.

Posted on February 22, 2007 10:25 AM | link to this entry

February 19, 2007

Bill's Laptop Barn.

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.

Posted on February 19, 2007 11:24 AM | link to this entry | Comments (4)

February 16, 2007

Be My Valentine

'Cause I'm all romantic and shit.

Posted on February 16, 2007 11:12 AM | link to this entry

February 14, 2007

Feel The Love.

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.

Posted on February 14, 2007 10:27 AM | link to this entry | Comments (1)

February 13, 2007

Prepare The Sled Dogs.

Well, InstaStormTrackerDopplerFirstWarningChopperOne weather (the Most Powerful In Maryland ^tm) alerts crawled across our TV screens last night warning us of something on the horizon, but after checking three different weathermen, the paper, and the gub'mint's website, nobody would commit to anything: the amount of self-promotional technology flogging is an inverse corrolary to the forecasting they actually do. We heard a lot of "well, we could get three to six inches of fresh snow, but it's probably going to be freezing rain." That forecast is about as useful as a sucking chest wound, asshole. What I'd appreciate is for you to commit to something so that I know for sure whether to join the mob at the safeway looting TP, milk, and Ho-Hos.

Honestly, I wasn't expecting any real snowfall this year, based on the schizophrenic weather we've had to date, but we seem to be getting some accumulation on the ground this morning, and they claim it's not stopping until tomorrow.

* * *

Note to the developer I met with yesterday: If you see me opening a MacBook Pro in front of you to give a presentation to our client, it's probably not a wise move to start in on an anti-Apple diatribe full of wild inaccuracies and total bullshit.

Posted on February 13, 2007 9:07 AM | link to this entry | Comments (4)

February 12, 2007

Flying Aces

I'm sorry for the extended absence; between a nasty stomach virus (the 8-20 day kind) and a healthy pile of work, I was a pretty quiet boy last week. I'm pressed for time this morning, so any update is going to have to wait until this afternoon, unfortunately.

I leave you here with a picture of my father-in-law's new posessions: a stack of airplane magazines from the late 30's, featuring vivid color covers, bare-knuckled serial tales of air pirates, dogfights, and adventure, balsa wood kit plans, and grainy pictures of exotic airplanes. Simply beautiful.

Posted on February 12, 2007 9:16 AM | link to this entry

February 7, 2007

Sick Day

I've got some kind of stomach bug, something I've had since Superbowl Sunday, which means the only people writing anything here have been comment spammers. I have an appointment to see the doctor tomorrow, which is the only thing I like less than being sick. Hopefully the burbling in my gut can be treated with something mild and cherry-flavored.

Posted on February 7, 2007 11:00 PM | link to this entry

February 6, 2007

Dateline: Philadelphia.

After rising at the ass-crack of dawn, we drove to the City of Brotherly Freezing Love to attend an Adobe seminar on the CS 2-3 suite. We're still working in earlier versions of Photoshop and Illustrator (after having been burned by Illustrator CS) and now that we're both on Intel Macs, we decided it's time to upgrade.

Posted on February 6, 2007 9:21 AM | link to this entry

February 1, 2007

Goodbye, My Child

It is with a heavy heart that I bid my trusty iBook adieu; after about 50 emails from various flakes, kooks, scammers, hosers, hustlers, dorks, cheapskates and losers over the course of a month, I had one very nice gentleman email me this afternoon, make an appointment, keep it, pay me cash money, and leave with the merchandise this evening. Which means this MacBook Pro is almost 1/2 paid off.

(The previous guy that emailed asked me all kinds of questions about the input jacks that he obviously knew the answers to, mentioned GarageBand, and tried to get me to come down on the price because there's no audio input on that model. Sorry, dude.)

So, sayonara, little guy; thanks for the memories. I'll miss your portability but not your little screen. I'm certainly not missing your keyboard, although it's taken me a full month to get used to this new one.