Reader’s loot
Here’s LRN2 and his birthday loot. Happy birthday, LRN2! I love you! Slightly fuzzy Great Art taken in low-light conditions courtesy of the exclusive iPhone-cam.
LRN2’s been raking in the stuff lately. His much-anticipated MacBook Pro and iPod Touch both arrived (via separate carriers and at different times) on Friday. Fortunately, it was my off Friday, so I was home for all the excitement. He’s in computer heaven. We immediately dissected his old beloved iBook (formerly LRN1’s old beloved iBook). It had long since passed its useful life. I really hated to see it go, though. Its disk drive lives on connected externally to Cooper, my old beloved G4 Mac Mini currently serving as a development and general-purpose machine in my office, its memory lives on inside Ted, my current beloved Linux laptop, and its CD/DVD drive is available when called upon. The rest was lovingly laid to rest in our outside garbage can. Rest in Peace, trusty old iBook.
Sniff, sniff. There, now I feel better.
Observant readers will notice that Cooper is once again not serving the television in the loft. Sadly, it was simply an untenable situation. It couldn’t do Netflix because the G4 isn’t supported for that purpose. No problem, said I; I bought a Roku. But then it turned out that it couldn’t do Hulu either, which is an absolute CPU and graphics card hog. Since Netflix and Hulu are the only things LRN4 cares about on a television, Cooper was out. Larry’s back in, with a fresh Windows XP install (ack!) and working fine, although Hulu is fairly marginal on that computer too, seeing as how it’s a four-year-old AMD 64-bit CPU with a four-year-old low-end graphics card. At least it’s a candidate for a future upgrade, though.
My ideal situation would be to get a MacBook Pro like LRN2’s as my main computer one of these days, at which time Curly, my beloved Intel Mac Mini would become the media center for the loft. It would do everything well in that role. Maybe someday.
No posts on Thursday or Friday. Didn’t feel like it. Both days were fine, thanks.
As were Saturday and Sunday. I attended priesthood meeting with the Spanish branch, and learned they had sustained a new Young Men president earlier that day. His counselors will be sustained next Sunday, after which we really need to sit down with them and help with some training. Really.
Otherwise . . . I don’t remember what I did all weekend. I’m sure it was exciting and useful, though.
I took the Suburban to work this morning and drove my beloved pickup home this afternoon. As I may have mentioned, the pickup is running rough at times, and I need to get it fixed. I can either do it myself if I can figure it out or get it over to our mechanic if I can’t. I also need to replace the serpentine belt and get the brake disks turned. I have no idea why all my rotors are warping these days. I’m not doing anything different, but they all seem to go bad. Even the Suburban’s relatively new brakes have started to wobble a bit. Sigh. It’s always something.
Found an interesting website today – zenhabits.net. Don’t let the “zen” mumbo jumbo put you off – check it out. It’s written by a guy who’s trying to simply his life, be more efficient and effective, get the things done he really wants to do, and be happy. Pretty much all goals I share. Lots of content. I recommend it.
I finally achieved something this evening I’ve been trying to do for quite some time – I got my Mac’s calendar, my iPhone’s calendar, and Google Calendar all talking to each other! Okay, it may not sound like a big deal to you, but I’m excited. For one thing, I’m trying to get more and more of my computer files into the cloud. I’m less worried about my privacy (I put everything I do on my blog as it as, as my Loyal Readers unfortunately know) than I am about losing everything. Well, my calendar’s safe. Now I have to figure out how to do the same thing with my contacts. My blog’s at Godaddy, so it’s safe. I’m going to have a look at Google Docs very soon. My sources tell me it does way less than Microsoft Word, but it does the things people really want it to do. So there’s that. Plus I have Evernote for short notes and other tidbits and Dropbox for miscellaneous stuff.
I still haven’t figured out how to get all my digital pictures into the cloud, though. Dropbox is way too small. So is the free account (did I mention I’m not willing to pay for any of this?) at Picasa – they only give you a gigabyte. What to do? In the meantime, my pictures are all backed up to my Time Machine disk, anyway. It’s just on the same desk as my Mac, so not quite immune to theft or fire or things like that.
And it’s just about 9:30 and I want to go to bed soon, so I’ll leave my Loyal Readers with this shocking food violence news: pop machine hatchet attack!
See you tomorrow.