RasterWeb!Says Dave of one of my old hang-outs:
There would be some closure to stopping in Madison on the way back east. When I moved to California in 1979, my departure point was East Johnson Street in Madison.
Johnson Street, ah the memories… It almost brings a tear to me eye…
(Hey Dave, as you leave Madtown start waving, if I see you an hour later, I’ll wave back…)
We went to the Apple Store last weekend. It was actually Emma’s idea. (I’m a proud dad!) So while the girls played Barbie games on the eMacs (under OS 9 interestingly enough) I checked out all the hardware. Damn technolust!
That iPod. Wow. 20 Gigs. Tiny. And it plays music. Out of my price range.
12″ PowerBook. Nice. Very nice. Tiny. Out of my price range.
17″ PowerBook… oh, not out yet… Pretty sure it’s out of my price range.
So I was using a nice shiny new PowerMac G4 and I tooled around iPhoto a bit, and got the spinning beachball, or lollypop, or whatever it is in Jaguar. I thought, “Well, no surprise, I get that a lot on my G3/250mhz Wallstreet, and my G4/400mhz at work, and even my G4/733mhz at home.” So I looked at the little sign, and realize I’m using a PowerMac G4 with dual 1 Gig processors.. and 1 Gig of RAM.
But I’m not worried, any day now Apple will come out with faster hardware, with more processors, and more RAM slots, and someday my friends, the spinning beachball, or lollypop, or whatever it is in the current version of the Mac OS, will be a distant memory…
Of this I am sure. Maybe.
Now this makes me peeved… I’ve been trying to install jabberd, the Jabber server. Now, I try on Mac OS X, no luck, I try on Yellow Dog Linux, no luck, but that’s a whole other problem involving GCC that I won’t get into. I then try under Red Hat Linux, and while things seem to work, there are some firewall issues I haven’t resolved yet. I decide, against my better judgement, to try the Windows version. It works. And, it was easy. Damn. I hate you Windows…
Officially the Windows version is ‘unsupported’ and I don’t plan to use it for anything more than testing… So there.
And yes, I’m once again looking into Jabber as a presence and IM platform.
(Try me at rasterboy@jabber.org if you must…)
It’s nice to see that Mark is now providing a mobile edition. It’s a good thing he didn’t decide to provide a Mobile Edition, or we might have had to unleash the lawyers…
We installed ethernet in the house recently. For those of you unfamiliar with network cabling, here’s some background: In the old days networks had to be built using ‘wires’ to carry data from one point to another. I know, it sound strange, but I swear it’s true. While today you might be able to just open your iBook and be on the internet, some of us actually have to plug a ‘network cable’ into the back of an old Wallstreet in order to connect it to other computers or download RSS feeds…
So luckily I got an electrician friend of ours to help. Beside having the right equipment, he also had a spool of Cat5 cable. That helped quite a bit. Another friend supplied a jack crimping tool, and after spending somewhere under $15 for jacks and connectors, and way too much time trying to make our own network cables, we’re wired. (Or weird, depending on who you ask.)
Yes, now we can send email from the basement to the bedroom, we can run an aggregator and alert others to our presence while on the couch. It’s all quite amazing, and fairly affordable as well. (Not to mention the 100Mbit speed of it all…)
The next step is to move the office back into the basement. I don’t even want to calculate how many times we’ve moved the office, but I’m guessing it’s well into the double digits…