Where Have I Been? 


Two weeks without a desktop computer. 

From now on, I will place any entry that is primarily technological under the Tech Dreck category. By this time, you probably have figured out that technology is a big part of me.

Anyway this has been an interesting two weeks. I finally took my beloved iMac G4 to the shop to get it the superdrive and the neck fixed. Got to hand it to Apple. I discovered I had purchased the wrong kind of warranty for this 'puter, but they refunded my money and sold me the right one, even after two+ years had gone by. And then they fixed the iMac to the tune of $700 under the new warranty. No charge. But I had to tremble for 14 days about the safety of this mind extension of mine.

However, I had purchased a Powerbook for Steve, and we got to take it on the road. It has the new Airport Extreme capability. We discovered a lot about wireless. Holiday Inn provides it for free, but you have to use TMobile at Red Roof. Either you buy a $30 a month subscription or you pay $10 a day for access. Of course you can use TMobile at Starbucks and other places. But I survived by going over to the local Holiday Inn where we were staying and picking up my mail. Wireless is definitely a great thing. You just get in range, and Airport wants to know if you want to join the wireless network it has found. Then, zip you are on the net.

I also got to play with Mac's new Tiger. There are a few glitzy things in Tiger, like Dashboard, which lets you view a range of useful information in a click. I thought it was much glitzier, though, when my 92 year old mom made the word "glitz" in Scrabble with the 'z' on the triple letter score and the whole word on the double. It's going to take a while to get through the ins and outs of Tiger.

So we were in Ohio for a week, and then I had to survive with the Powerbook on my desk for a week. But TODAY my iMac G4 came home. Wow, I have spent the WHOLE day. First I installed Tiger on the iMac G4. Then of course I had to test out all my major applications: Address Book, Reunion, Mail, Calendar, iBlog, Safari, Word, Dreamweaver, Filemaker Pro, Quicken, iTunes, Yahoo Messenger. And that's only the half of it. Mail had to import from the old version. But what really got me bogged down was getting iCal to synch with my Palm Zire 21. I'm still working on that after two hours. I can see how most people are totally mystified by much of what the computer does.

But it looks like I am back in the swim. At least Steve's and my calendars are reading each other, that's nice.

Well, my work is cut out for me. I have to keep testing this one out, get the Powerbook on Steve's desk, install iSight, convert the G3 to a music workstation. I'll see you in 2006. (Heh, heh! No such luck.)  

Posted: Fri - November 11, 2005 at 11:21 AM          

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