All Quiet on the Home Front…again...
I’ve actually written more than has gotten published in this blog; I’ve just been so busy I haven’t been able to get the stuff posted. I still have to finish balancing my checkbook, something I started last week before I got distracted by oldest natural born kid’s deciding he wanted my dual 1.25 Ghz G4 PowerMac. I’ve spent every spare minute of the last several days getting it ready to go. I thought it was only going to take a couple of hours, but Jaguar kept corrupting, forcing me to upgrade it to Panther. Additionally, I discovered that the PowerMac’s Firewire 400 ports were dead and lost more time confirming it and then coming up with a workaround. A Q-Sport combination Firewire 400 and USB 2.0 card I bought at Fry’s, one that claimed to be PC and Mac compatible and used a VIA chipset, was totally unrecognized by the PowerMac. I looted my PC, taking from it a SIIG USB 2.0 (2 ports), Firewire 400 (1 port), and 10/100 Ethernet (1 port) combo card that the Mac immediately saw and put the Q-Sport card in the PC, adding a LAN card to take the place of the lost Ethernet port. After adding as many updates as I could find and loading up X11 and GIMP, I then packaged the PowerMac for shipment, along with the other packages, including a 20 inch Apple Cinema Display, that was to accompany it.
My wife and I drove the four packages for Mike, one package for my sister Debbie (containing a Panther Family Pack), and one package for Tim (containing a Radeon 7500 video card to use to troubleshoot his dual 1 GHz PowerMac) up to a local FedEx World Shipping Center. While I was standing at a counter off to the side and filled out paperwork, a young man asked if the PowerMac G4 box really held one. I replied it did, and he hovered like a bee near a hive. He wanted to buy it. Resisting the temptation to sell it on the spot, I told him that Apple was no longer manufacturing them and he could find them on eBay, something he didn’t seem interested in doing. He said he was a recent switcher, he had been “a Windows person forever”, and I responded that I had been, too. Discipline and promises won out, and I finished filling out all the forms with my wife’s help and we took the stuff to the counter. It came to seventy-one bucks and change all told, but I was finally done. Something for almost everyone in my family was now sailing out of Houston; my office was finally uncluttered, and my life could return to normal, such as it is.
My wife and I drove the four packages for Mike, one package for my sister Debbie (containing a Panther Family Pack), and one package for Tim (containing a Radeon 7500 video card to use to troubleshoot his dual 1 GHz PowerMac) up to a local FedEx World Shipping Center. While I was standing at a counter off to the side and filled out paperwork, a young man asked if the PowerMac G4 box really held one. I replied it did, and he hovered like a bee near a hive. He wanted to buy it. Resisting the temptation to sell it on the spot, I told him that Apple was no longer manufacturing them and he could find them on eBay, something he didn’t seem interested in doing. He said he was a recent switcher, he had been “a Windows person forever”, and I responded that I had been, too. Discipline and promises won out, and I finished filling out all the forms with my wife’s help and we took the stuff to the counter. It came to seventy-one bucks and change all told, but I was finally done. Something for almost everyone in my family was now sailing out of Houston; my office was finally uncluttered, and my life could return to normal, such as it is.
posted by Andy Foster at
2:20 AM
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