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Here’s Loyal Reader Number Twelve making a quick call with her favorite Christmas present. She gets busy!

Wonders of Blogger today. I’m kind of surprised good old Anonymous missed it. Friday was our anniversary, and while I did fiddle with computers for quite a while, I didn’t find time to blog.

Speaking of fiddling with computers, I have a tragedy with a happy ending to report. First the tragedy: Loyal Reader Number Four’s computer has bitten the dust. It had been behaving erratically for quite a while – some applications wouldn’t start and others crashed a lot. I took a look at it on Friday and decided it must have gotten a virus or some other corruption, so I tried to reinstall the operating system. It wouldn’t install. I suspected a bad OS disk, so I downloaded the latest version of Ubuntu Linux and tried to install it. It wouldn’t install. That disk had an option to verify the computer’s memory, so I ran it. It reported numerous memory problems, all of them in the same bit, which is consistent with a bad memory stick, of which the computer had only one. I tried installing again anyway and noticed the CD drive was making funny speeding-up-and-slowing-down sounds. Ubuntu reported that it couldn’t install because of a bad CD drive. At that point, I declared the computer dead. Services were held last night in Loyal Reader Number One’s room, at which time the 20 GB hard disk (which SpinRite had declared perfectly functional) and power supply were surgically removed for later transplant and the remains dissected for sport and frolic.

So much for the sad news. Now for the happy ending. Loyal Reader Number Three, LRN4, and I went to a few stores to look at replacement PCs. We saw a few machines she might have liked; the prices weren’t too great, but there were a couple of decent deals. She finally decided to take the plunge and switch to a Mac, though, so I ordered a new Mac Mini for myself (before the Loyal Readers get all huffy, that’s what she asked me to do!) and moved my existing Mini down to her desk. I’m in the middle of setting it up right now. All the software is installed and I’m now moving files – I especially hope to get Entourage to recognize the old Outlook mail and contacts files. Wait a minute – it’s ready for me to give that a try.

— Time lapse —

I’m back. I haven’t been able to get LRN4’s old emails yet, but I do have pretty much everything else set up. We’ve been through a little bit of Mac training and I think she’s going to like it. I have a couple of plans for getting her old emails into the system. They all involve opening them using various programs on Loyal Reader Number Two’s system and saving them in different formats.

And what am I doing for a computer now that LRN4 has my Mac and I don’t have my new Mac yet (it’s scheduled to arrive sometime between January 3 and 9)? Thanks for asking. I have Larry, my Linux server, set up as my temporary emergency backup computer. It has all my email accounts in Thunderbird and copies of all my documents. I’ll be fine. Really.

Otherwise, not much is new. LRN4 and I went out to the local Indian restaurant for our twenty-ninth anniversary celebration. We were the only people eating there, although a couple of people came in for take-out while we were there. I can’t figure out how some of these restaurants stay in business. I figure either they have a good lunch trade or they’re laundering money. In any case, the food was good. We ordered “medium” spiciness and got “outrageously hot,” but it worked out okay. Our mouths burned for just a little while after we got home.

LRN4 isn’t feeling too well today. She has my pity. She might go lie down for a little while to try to recover. Or maybe not.

My helicopter is broken again. It ran into a wall and the same part snapped off. Sigh. I’m going to try to fix it again, maybe more permanently again.

Have a great weekend. See you on Monday.

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