Edit Since taking this test, I’ve found that all of my ‘wrong’ answers were where I made a definite choice between two options where either (in the test’s author’s opinion) would have been acceptable. So I’m slightly bouyed by the thought that whatever I chose to write would have used correct grammar or vocabulary. However, this is no cure for my usual banality.

It’s 99% official. The 802.11g card doesn’t work with OS9. So when I take my Pismo to bed my feet will continue to be strangled by the ethernet cable. Don’t even ask where the power cable ends up.

My dealer has been busted!

Ok, the Pismo hasn’t arrived yet, so I’m a bit stuck [for testing your DVD drive before dispatching it].
I’m rapidly coming to the conclusion that all 4 drives I have are faulty.

My parents have gone to visit friends in Stuttgart for a week. They’ve arrived safely. Their luggage hasn’t. Dad says it’s a fairly minor inconvenience – the luggage should arrive later today and mum took her diabetes kit as hand luggage. Still, it meant my parents could travel unemcumbered to their friends’ house and they might get some free new clothes

I’ve finally succumbed to Apple’ iTunes Music Store. My purchases were:

• The Piper at the Gates of Dawn
• Radio K.A.O.S.
• Amused to death

My dealer has problems:

I think my reference machine has become flaky as it is erroring every CD and DVD drive I have.

I prefer to test every item before shipping but I’m unable to test the DVD drive.

I have another on the way in a couple of days and will look at repairing this one.

So I can either ship you all the parts with the DVD drive untested, or hold on for a few days until I can test it.

Sympathy for him.

Not too big a problem for since I’m away at a training course tomorrow and will probably be too knackered to do any surgery over the weekend. Perhaps I’ll learn patience!

I have ordered

• 512GB of RAM (so I can keep the current 128MB and hence total 640MB)
• a second-hand 30GB hard disk (wish I could afford the 150GB 5400 rpm version)
• a replacement LuckyGoldstar DVD-ROM/CD drive. See Silicon Overdrive for why I need this replacement.

  (The better Matshita drives won’t fit behind the plastic bezel that covers the LG model. I’m sure a judicious bit of carving could sort this but eventually I’ll get a DVD-RW drive and that won’t properly fit behind either variety of bezel anyway.)

Time to break out The Piper At the Gates of Dawn and indulge myself.

My Buffalo 802·g wireless card arrived. (See Silicon Overdrive.)

The outer wrapping only mentioned various flavours of Windows, despite the ebay advert mentioning that the card worked with G3 and G4 powerbooks. A quick google told me that the card does indeed work with macs – but only under OSX. So do I

• give up on 802·g, sell this card and buy an Apple airport (802·b) card
• wait until the parts mentioned in Interstellar Overdrive part 1 arrive and are installed and then pollute my Pismo with OSX?

I’m actually a grudging convert to OSX: I can count the times I’ve crashed it on my thumbs, waiting on a recalcitrant web page to load doesn’t block the rest of the mac and Safari beats the pants off Internet Exploder. The downside is that OSX is slow on a G4/400 with 5400rpm disk. I think it will be even slower on a G3 with a slower hard disk.

The moral of this story is ‘always be bloody sure of what you’re buying on eBay!’

We heard on Monday about a schools event in Glenrothes: Out of School Hours Learning and so commited 3 staff-days to it. Turns out it’s mostly aimed at primary and we have almost no primary school books. Still, it’s a lot of fun watching primary kids at the workshop in the hall where our stand is: it’s about capuira, a brazilian dance/martial art!

This is the only English-language link about it I can find. However, if you speak Indonesian…

OK, while not making up article titles based on Pink Floyd material and drooling over my Pismo, I do other things:

1. work (I’m Production Manager at a Scottish educational publishing house)
2. maintain Digital Evidence, my online photo album
3. try to promote Fairtrade
4. and have just been elected Treasurer of the local Community Council.

I think that’s as near as I’m ever going to get to having a life!