Sunday
September 29, 2002

Tiny Tech Time

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Here are a few of my favorite online haunts:

REALTOR.ca
[This is the site I visit to fantasize about living in Toronto again, which is almost every single day during the winter]

Jonathan Cainer's Zodiac Forecasts
[This is where I visit in the morning, when I need a positive spin on things past, present and future.]

Living Local
[This is where I go to see what Canadians are up to, sometimes I even buy things from the businesses listed there.]

Environment Canada Weather
[This is the site I visit every morning, and before every road trip during the winter]

Computers have occupied my time of the last few days.

It all started while I was reading my e-mail. The computer froze. No problem, I thought, I will just restart. However, the computer did not restart. I tried everything, at least everything I knew. The computer did not restart. When I finally inserted and ran the Apple Hardware Test CD, the problem was immediately apparent, "No Devices Found". This was bad. This was 6:00 a.m. in the morning.

One thing I have always done, when purchasing a new Apple Computer, has been to pay for the extended warranty. The AppleCare support telephones did not begin taking calls until 9:00 a.m. It was a three-hour wait for confirmation that I had a serious hardware problem.

With my AppleCare case ID number in hand, I called a local Apple authorized dealer. Luckily, this particular company has a very competent and personable young man, Andy, who fixes computers. Their sales staff are another story. I find that I only have to describe the problem to Andy once. He gets it. Then he fixes it.

It was bad. It was very bad. The CPU had died. This is an expensive problem. The part is worth $1510.00. Thanks to the extended warranty, the final bill was zero. The computer was gone and back again within twenty-four hours. Andy is a special person.

The mistake I made was that I did not grab my computer and run out the door. Feeling euphoric, standing in a room surrounded by desirable hardware and software, I could not resist the sirens of commerce. I just had to spend some of the money I had just "saved".

So you see, this is how I came to install a new operating system on Marjory.

It took two days to backup the entire hard drive. It took another half-day to defrag the drive/partitions, check everything for virus infections, and rebuild all the desktops.

It was not until yesterday morning that I was finally ready to install OSX (Jaguar). It was surprisingly simple, and worked unattended while I did interesting things like the breakfast dishes.

Any new operating system requires fine-tuning so that things work as they should. This is the part of computing that I enjoy the most. One can spend happy hours choosing a background image, starting up new programs for the first time, and hooking up gadgets such as the digital camera. Most of the programs I use can be upgraded for OSX at no cost. Those upgrades with price tags attached will have to wait for another time; but the old versions function perfectly in OS 9, which is still installed on Marjory.

After a very short training session, the dictation software is proving to be a big success. It works so well, that I am telling myself that the advantages justify the expense. That is what I tell myself. I believe me...

Life is a tautology.



Top of Page
RECIPES :: Cast

Worldly Distractions

Apples
Season's Bounty



By the Easy Chair
Relics of a Lost Civilization
by Chen Shen
Rotunda Summer/Fall 2002



Quote
"Give me enough that I can do something, but not enough that you care what it is."
Steve Smith of Red Green, 2002



Weather
18:59 EDT
Temp: 20`C
Humidity: 78%
Wind: S 11 km/h
Barometric:102.1 kPa

Sunrise 7:19 AM EDT
Sunset 7:09 PM EDT
 

Page by Page: A Woman's Journal
Photography
Poetry
by Maggie Turner

Canadian Maggie Turner writes and publishes poetry, photography, and a personal journal online. Her work reflects the current way of life in Canada, embracing Canada's past, present, and future in a unique portrayal of everyday life. Maggie's voice is one of the many that actively depict the rich diversity of Canadian culture.

Photography: "a term which comes from the Greek words photos (light) and graphos (drawing). A photograph is made with a camera by exposing film to light in order to create a negative. The negative is then used in the darkroom to print a photograph (positive) onto light-sensitive paper.
Source: University of Arizona Glossary

Poetry: "a form of speech or writing that harmonizes the music of its language with its subject. To read a great poem is to bring out the perfect marriage of its sound and thought in a silent or voiced performance. At least from the time of Aristotle's Poetics, drama was conceived of as a species of poetry."
Source: Creative Studios

Journal: " "Though a journal may be many things - a treasury, a storehouse, a jewelry box, a laboratory, a drafting board, a collector's cabinet, a snapshot album, a history, a travelogue..., a letter to oneself - it has some definable characteristics. It is a record, an entry-book, kept regularly, though not necessarily daily.... Some (entries) will be nearly illegible, written in the dark in the middle of the night.... Not only is it a record for oneself, but of oneself. Every memorable journal, any successful journal, is honest. Nothing sham, phony, false...." (Dorothy Lambert from Ken Macrorie's book, Writing to be Read )
A journal is a way to keep track of your thoughts about what you read... as well as what you did on any given day."
Source: Journal Writing

A Blog is an online journal created by server side software, often hosted by a commercial interest.

"The term "weblog" was coined by Jorn Barger[4] on 17 December 1997. The short form, "blog," was coined by Peter Merholz, who jokingly broke the word weblog into the phrase we blog in the sidebar of his blog Peterme.com in April or May 1999.[5][6][7] Shortly thereafter, Evan Williams at Pyra Labs used "blog" as both a noun and verb ("to blog," meaning "to edit one's weblog or to post to one's weblog") and devised the term "blogger" in connection with Pyra Labs' Blogger product, leading to the popularization of the terms."
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_blogging


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