chrishansenhome

I've lost my camera, somehow. It used to live on my desk in the study, and yesterday I wanted to take a picture and didn't see it. I have torn the house apart and can't find it. HWMBO has promised to help find it, but it's just another annoyance among many. I suspect it was tidied away when we had our little dinner party last week. I hope to be able to find it. If not, I suppose the opportunity to buy a new one looms.

The problems I had with my Internet Bridge have been solved! and We have mc3bbs as a houseguest for a week. I am always happy to see Chaz; he's exuberant, witty, fun, and very accomplished. He brings presents of peanut butter and smokehouse almonds for HWMBO, and adobo seasoning and Irish Spring soap for me. But he also brings his expertise.

Now I've posted before about my iMac and the travails I went through to upgrade it. I cannot find where I posted about my travails with the internet bridge that I was using to connect to my WiFi from the spare bedroom upstairs, but I'm sure I did. Tags are a beyotch sometimes.

In any case, about a year ago I went to turn on the iMac and it stubbornly refused to connect to the Internet. As the Internet is made of cats, I just assumed that something was wrong with the connection or the internet bridge. I tried everything I could to connect, but not being a Mac-head, I couldn't get it to connect. I bought other hardware and tried that. No dice. I considered connecting up the room with ethernet cable. I never got around to that. Meanwhile, the iMac was stubbornly accusing me every time I went into the room.

When mc3bbs arrived, I pleaded (well, maybe not pleaded, but nearly) with him to take a look at it. He worked on it at intervals, and finally discovered that, far from being something wrong with the internet bridge, it was something wrong with the iMac's software. I was gobsmacked. Figuring this out did not take Mac-itude, it took networkitude, and Chaz has it in spades. So I now have an upgraded original iMac that connects to the internet through the bridge. I am quite pleased, and look forward to playing with it at intervals in the future and learning more about it.

Next iMac-connected task: replace the onboard backup battery. As is usual, it's not a PC-type "hearing aid" battery, but a 1/2AA 3.7V battery that even Maplin on the Strand didn't have in stock. I have ordered one online, and with postage it came to more than £7.

My 40 high-school reunion is in October and, unfortunately, I won't be there. I was at the 30th, and there was only one other classmate there, and of course he was someone I barely remembered. Time…marches on!

I really must adjust the amount of time I spend on the Intarwebz. I have been frittering away lots of time on Facebook (turned off location services yesterday, though. Yay me!), Twitter, e-mail, and blogs. I need to spend a bit more time doing productive things So I'm going to reserve two hours a day for something productive: either reading, or some sort of learning. This will cut down on the amount of material I post in various places.

The Archers Why the hell am I listening to this? Someone rescue me!

Medical matters The foot ulcers are steadily getting better, according to the district nurses. That's all I want to say about it now but that's just because I'm tired of it and don't particularly want to witter on. On my way back from the pharmacy this afternoon I bumped into the Canon Pastor of the Cathedral in the tunnels underneath the Elephant and with my pillow cast (which now looks a bit ragged) I felt as though I had turned into a street person. Oh well.

Programs that are quite stupid. I use Semagic to post to Livejournal, and I'm mostly satisfied with it. HOWEVER, I wanted to intentionally misspell a word above and it won't let me, whatever I do. What a pain.

A few days ago I wrote about upgrading my iMac from 32 MB memory to 384 MB, and from 6 GB hard disk to 80 GB. Now I've installed OS X, and am doing my first post from the iMac. It's quite an eye-opener. I haven't yet taken advantage of the many features that people say the Mac offers. However, some observations might be in order:

1) The installation, while relatively simple, is not intuitive. OS X told me that it couldn't install on the 80 GB hard disk because it had to be in the first 8 GB of the disk. All well and good; why then didn't it offer to partition the disk for me appropriately and then continue with the install? Instead I had to struggle with a disk utility that was itself not particularly intuitive. That over, I had to reboot yet again in order to start the install anew as the program refused resolutely to recognise that the disk had been partitioned.

2) That being said, once the installation happened the machine fully configured the Ethernet connection for me; no struggling as with OS 8 and OS 9.

3) Wonder of wonders, it has now found the printer on my PC. However, it still won't print through it. Another mystery for another day.

4) Instead of the horrible round green Apple mouse, I not only put a Microsoft optical mouse on the machine, I was able to download software that allows it to be left/right hand configured. The scroll wheel works.

Does this mean that I'll become a Mac-head and toss all the PCs out? I don't think so. However, it's always nice to have a new toy with which to play. Now I have one, and it's exciting. WL can now surf Chinese websites from the kitchen table with full rendering of the Chinese characters.