morrowlife

Here’s a picture of the new iPhone from Macworld the other day. The back side of it, anyway. Very artistic, says I. Dopey, says you? What do you know?

Disaster! The Miata’s not ready yet. Sometime next week, they say. What is left for me to believe in now? Still, I suppose I would rather have it be right than quick. But I want it now.

It’s the weekend! Time to stay home and work on the Sable. And not drive the Miata. Dang. And do a bunch of other things too.

Loyal Readers Numbers Five and Twelve are heading for Big Bear tomorrow for LRN5’s birthday celebration. They’ll be gone until Wednesday. It’ll seem kind of quiet around here without them. LRN12’s other grandparents need to see her every once in a while, though.

The DVD for Aunt Misty appears to have worked out just fine. At least it plays on my DVD players. We’ll have to see if it works on hers. She’s certainly the star of that show.

The boys went on a temple trip today. They’re still not home yet, so it’s impossible to tell whether they enjoyed it or not. I’m betting on yes.

And it’s time to quit. A new episode of Monk is on. See you on Monday.

Here’s Loyal Reader Number One up to his elbows in his iBook, getting ready to install his new hard drive. All those guts look pretty gory to me. Oh well; no guts, no gory.

And no, Loyal Readers, that wasn’t a typo. I was trying to be funny. Sheesh.

And please disregard my statement of a few days ago that I bought a new Toshiba hard drive. Photographic evidence proves it’s a Fujitsu.

No post yesterday, and I didn’t even find the time to use the Wonders of Blogger. I didn’t attend my church meeting, though. My brother-in-law Ken called in the afternoon and told us he was in town. He came over for dinner and we spent a few hours chatting while LRN1 worked on setting up Ken’s new Smart Phone. It’s a really nice phone, but it was pretty hard to set up and begs the question asked at Macworld Expo – if these phones are so smart, why is it so hard to make a phone call with them?

It’s finally starting to warm back up here in Lardville. The cold snap‘s not quite over, but it’s actually predicted to be in the mid-sixties on Saturday. That’s a huge improvement, and quite possibly just in time to bring the Miata home. Wouldn’t it be nice if it was good top-down motoring weather? I thought you’d agree. Especially my Loyal Readers in Cold Country.

I’m working on making a DVD for Loyal Reader Number Six’s Aunt Misty tonight. I ripped one of LRN6’s DVDs of Airwolf for him and extracted the episode featuring Aunt Misty. I wasn’t quite sure how to get that one episode on the DVD he wants to give her, but I finally just decided to try importing it into iMovie. It seems to be working – it’s been crunching for about 45 minutes so far with 15 minutes left to go, so I can’t guarantee anything, of course, but I fully expect my trusty Mac to reward me with unmitigated success. As usual.

Tomorrow’s a work Friday, alas. I managed to finish my Top Secret clearance application today. I put it off for about a month and a half because it was such an unpleasant job the last time I did one. Imagine my pleased surprise when I discovered that the online system remembered all my answers from my last application. All I had to do was make a few minor updates and it was good to go. Now I’m sorry I procrastinated it for so long. Only about a year to wait now and I’ll be eligible for a few additional programs.

Saturday is Miata day, as mentioned before, and it’s also Sable brake job day. It needs it pretty badly – metal scraping sounds are so disturbing on the freeway – and I’ve decided to do it myself, for better or worse. It really shouldn’t be too hard, assuming the rotors will come off with any degree of ease. Fortunately, I can afford to leave the car in the garage for a few days if things go Horribly Wrong. Which probably won’t happen.

Anyway. Time for dessert and bed. See you tomorrow.

Here’s what the driver sees just before he gets into my new/old car. Check out those highly-optional chrome sill plates. Wow. That’s a thing of beauty. Truly Great Art.

It’s a sad day for Loyal Reader Number One. His beautiful hard disk installation job has to be undone – sort of. You see, there was this unidentified magnet just sitting in the case near the optical drive. It dropped out when he was in the middle of the teardown, and since the wonderfully clear instructions didn’t say anything about a magnet in that particular location, we decided to leave it out when he put it back together. Bad idea. It turns out that the magnet lets the computer know the top is closed so it can go to sleep. No magnet, no sleep. He’s going to take it apart again Real Soon Now. You’re always taking a risk when you take on a project like that, but there’s every reason to believe it will go very well again.

On a positive note, the new hard disk definitely cured the problem, so hooray for that.

I got a note from the Miata lady today. She’s hard at work on getting the car ready for me; she’s fixing everything we agreed on and the few things I noticed on Saturday as well. Seems like a really nice woman and a True Enthusiast to boot. I’m excited to get the car.

Took care of Loyal Reader Number Twelve for a few minutes this evening. The boys went to Battle Axe lessons a little after 7:00 and Loyal Reader Number Four got home about half an hour later. In the meantime, I was on my own. I’m surprised they trusted me, but I guess you’ll do just about any crazy thing when you get desperate enough.

It’s not quite 9:00 yet, but I think I’ll quit and actually have a life this evening in the short remaining time before bed. See you tomorrow.

Here’s a beautiful pile of Mac Minis from the Macworld Expo the other day. What a thing of beauty. Great Art? You be the judge.

Boy, the Loyal Readers are getting restless! Two typo corrections in one day. And by my dear old friend Anonymous to boot. I appreciate my Loyal Readers’ ongoing quest for perfection. After all, that’s why they’re Loyal Readers. Of course.

Fine weekend. Dropped off the deposit for the Miata on Saturday afternoon. It sure looks nice. We think it will be ready to pick up next Saturday. Woo hoo!

LRN1’s hard disk died on him on Friday and Saturday. It was a slow and painful death. He tried everything to get it working right, to no avail. He found an excellent website explaining how to get the hard drive out of an iBook, complete with printable sheets to organize all the tiny parts. Sunday was teardown day. Success! Nothing broke. I dropped by Fry’s this evening on the way home from work and found a nice 120 GB Toshiba (tried to make a link to their website, but it freaked out my browser, so no free advertising for them!) for a very attractive price – the exact same amount as an 80 GB drive, in fact. As of this writing, he already has it installed, the machine is back together, and OS X is just finishing up installing. On top of getting the fix done, he’s upgraded from 30 to 120 Gigs, so it’s all good. We’re still keeping our fingers crossed, just in case there’s something else wrong, but we’re pretty sure we pinpointed the problem. After he took the old one out, we hooked it up to my Mini to check it out. It worked for a few minutes and then crashed the Mini exactly like it had done to the iBook. QED.

While I was at Fry’s, I finally bought an enclosure for my DVD-RW, allowing me to permanently hook it up to my Mac. Sadly, while it works great in USB mode, it doesn’t work at all in FireWire mode. Since I sort of want to get what I paid for, I’m planning to exchange it later this week. Dang. It sure works great when it works, though.

Not much else to report. Loyal Reader Number Six came up this weekend. He and Loyal Reader Number Five went to a Napa Valley bed and breakfast for his birthday weekend. Loyal Readers Numbers Five and Twelve are going down to Big Bear next weekend (I think that’s when, anyway) for LRN5’s birthday weekend. Lots of travel for those three. I’m staying put.

And that’s it for a cold, sunny Monday on Lardville. See you tomorrow and thanks for the typo reports.

Here are Loyal Readers Numbers One and Two at Macworld Expo in San Francisco this morning. We had a great time! We saw lots of neat Mac and iPod stuff and just enjoyed the atmosphere.

We saw perhaps the ultimate iPod accessory:

That’s definitely for the person who already has everything else. We heard it play, so we can at least confirm that part works. Somebody else will have to confirm its other functions.

The trip was made possible by this being my day off from work. I hope things went well for those guys at the office.

In the afternoon, Loyal Reader Number Four and I went to Riverbank and looked at another Miata. It looks just like this one, except that it’s not brand new. Otherwise, identical – color, accessories, and trim. Anyway, I bought it. Or at least promised to buy it. The woman who owns it (and many other Miatas for sale, by the way – she runs a Miata business out of her house) still has a little bit of work to do on it, so it won’t be available for another three or four days. And of course I have to give her some money. But not too much. I’m looking forward to getting it and starting to have fun, fun, fun. As I believe I mentioned yesterday, when you spend most of your free time in your car, a car is a pretty good hobby. That and my computers. And my websites. And my reading.

Anyway, this will be my fourth convertible. I really like this one. It’s a black ’92 special edition with leather, cruise, power windows, BBS wheels, headrest speakers, wood shift knob and parking brake handle, power antenna, and maybe a few other optional extras I can’t remember. They just put a new windshield and top on it, along with a bunch of other things. It doesn’t need anything right now – or at least it won’t need anything by the time I get it. Of course, it’s old enough that I’m sure it will need some things soon, but that’s all part of the fun.

It’s late and time for bed. Have a great weekend and I’ll see you on Monday.