I wish I had the time to read through all of this!

… MsInvisFem for the new picture

…to for the bestest birthday cake ever! Here’s her recipe. Photos to go up on Digital Evidence real soon.

OK, now I finally have the laptop of my dreams(1) and am sitting in bed irradiating my face, warming my groin and keying my verbal diarrhoea into LiveJournal. However, being an inveterate twitchy-fingered would-be geek who just can’t leave well enough alone, I can’t wait to upgrade, peripheralise and modify it.

Here’s the plan so far.

REPAIRS

• The power cable is very dodgy and needs replaced ASAP.
• The DVD-ROM drive was DOA. This may have something to do with the Pismo being shipped with a CD in the drive. However, I’ve also been told that Apple used LuckyGoldstar and Matshita drives. LG are allegedly extremely prone to sudden death. So just guess which brand my Pismo has.

You may want to know how I managed to install anything on the Pismo. Well, the vendor installed OS9.2 before shipping so I didn’t need to install an OS. I have a DVD-ROM/CD-ROM in an external USB2 enclosure. This is very flaky but stayed alive long enough for me to install a previously-bought Ratoc PC card which facilitates use of SCSI-1 and SCSI-2 peripherals. Then I installed all my OS9 junk via a Lacie SCSI-1 CD-RW drive. Currently there’s no way of installing OSX. Fortunately there’s currently no actual need for OSX! I do miss Safari and I can’t tell you how tedious not having iJournal is right now.

UPGRADES

• 128MB is OK for OS9 (but makes Photoshop a bit pedestrian) and is not enough for OSX. Eventually I’ll want to max out at 1GB.
• The stock 6GB HD is nowhere near enough for OSX or my modest iTunes collection. 150GB HDs are available but I’ll probably go for 20 to 40GB and some form of external storage/backup. A large NAS(2) device would be just spiffy for sharing files between the Pismo and my G4/400 desktop.(3) Failing this, I’ll just have to keep my Eudora folder on iDisk!(4)
• A DVD-RW drive.
• Wireless. A Buffalo 802.11g card is on the way. (Otherwise I’d be limited to classic Airport: 802.11b)

PERIPHERALS

• A decent set of headphones!
• I’ll possibly transfer my Wacom A6 graphics tablet to this machine and get something funkier for the G4. Not really a lot of point in this since my eventual aim is to upgrade this Pismo enough that I can retire the G4.
• A USB hub (Well how else do I attach my PDA, graphics tablet, external keyboard, printer, scanner, digital camera,….?)
• Since my aim is to have this machine eventually become my main machine, a 17-inch or bigger flatscreen monitor. I quite fancy Wacom’s graphics tablet -cum-21-inch monitor.
• Some form of docking station to avoid all the tedious unplugging business.
• A rest for angling the keyboard and blowing cool air onto the underside.

MODIFICATIONS
This where the Pismo (currently a 400MHz G3) will really leapfrog the G4 and become properly suitable for OSX.

• Apparently I can get a 1GHz G4 chip fitted in the Pismo. So either I’ll have a shit-hot laptop second only to a 17-inch Powerbook G4 or I’ll have the world’s most expensive toaster.
• Failing this, 500MHz G4offerings from DayStar, FastMac or PowerLogix will still blow the socks off the G4.
• The Pismo is sleek, black and curvaciously sexy. So please talk me out of colouring the shell dayglo Paisley pattern!

OK, time to post my ramblings and go to sleep , cudding my baby.

Notes

1. OK, the 500MHz model would have been nice but at under £200, even I can’t complain!
2. Network Attached Storage
3. I wonder if Firewire drives can be accessed simultanously by two macs?
4. Apple’s on-line file storage system. You too can rent some space on Steve Jobs’ servers!

…is what I thought said. She had actually said someone’s name but I misheard.

MsInvisFem swears blind that she does not have Tourette’s. On other occasions she has referred to me as a deaf wanker.

I”m sure a lot of the humour is lost in the translation. MsInvisFem says she has lost it too.

OK, I now have more computers than I know what to do with:

• Palm Zire: probably the best present ever – thank you .
  OK, most of you will call it a PDA but it’s still a computer to me. (The nearest available model is the Zire 21 – same as the Zire but 8MB rather than 2)
• Two Powerbook Duo 230s: 33MHz, 4MB RAM, 300MB HD- bought as a job lot for £12 so I could cannibalise their keyboards as replacements for the keyboard on the Duo 2300c. This didn’t work – instead of the problem below, neither of these keyboards have functional spacebars or Q keys!
• Powerbook Duo 2300c plus DuoDock: 100MHz, 56MB RAM, 1.1GB HD and 1.0GB HD in the DuoDock (but dead 2, 4, 6, 8, 0 and – keys and many dead pixels)
  A brilliant idea: a barebones laptop (CPU, monitor, keyboard, and trackpad) but slot it in the Dock and you have a desktop-style computer.
  Must-have-all-my-peripherals-with-me-now roadwarriors can clip on a mini-Dock which allows addition of external ADB keyboard and mouse, floppy drive, 10BaseT ethernet, monitor, modem and SCSI drive. Their shoulders will ache!
• PowerMac G4/400 MHz. A bit more than the stock model and a great machine under OS9 but pedestrian under OSX. Still, apart from the Zire, it’s my only fully-functional computer.
  384MB RAM
  original 10GB ATA HD, 80GB ATA HD, 35GB SCSI HD
  DVD-RW
  original 100MB Zip drive
  4-port USB card
  TV tuner card – only works under OS9
  SCSI card
  original DVD-RAM drive in an external USB2 box
  external SCSI CD-RW
  Macally keyboard and mouse
  Wacom A6 graphics tablet
• My latest baby: Powerbook G3/Firewire (aka Pismo): 400MHz, 128MB RAM and 6GB HD
  Dead DVD-R drive – sob, sniff
  See next-but-one post for my plans to hotrod this sexy beast.

Today I suggested jokingly to Granada Learning’s head of business projects that he might want to shoot me because I didn’t have a piece of info to hand. (I was waiting for a reply from one of our authors.) He said he’d do it quickly and painlessly and give me the choice of when. So the timetable is:

1. 04/03/06 Bruce is shot
2. 05/03/06 hence Bruce avoids becoming 40
3. 06/03/06 my autobiography comes out, with sales boosted by the recent tragic event

Proceeds to?

The only way to describe the contents of a C*d*u*y’s C*e*e E*g

Normally I don’t dream (or if I do I forget them before I wake). This one I remembered 12 hours after it occurred:

Details are a little hazy but I was in David Gilmour’s house, being taught to cook by his wife.

I wonder why I didn’t dream of him having taught me to play guitar? Maybe it’s because that’s my waking fantasy.

Next time you have a bad day at work… think of this guy…
Rob is a commercial saturation diver for Global Divers in Louisiana. He performs underwater repairs on offshore drilling rigs.
Below is an email he sent to his sister. She then sent it to radio station 103.2 on FM dial in Ft. Wayne, Indiana, who was sponsoring a worst job experience contest. Needless to say, she won.
——————————————————

Hi Sue,

Just another note from your bottom-dwelling brother. Last week I had a bad day at the office. I know you’ve been feeling down lately at work, so I thought I would share my dilemma with you to make you realize it’s not so bad after all. Before I can tell you what happened to me, I first must bore you with a few technicalities of my job.

As you know, my office lies at the bottom of the sea. I wear a suit to the office. It’s a wetsuit. This time of year the water is quite cool. So what we do to keep warm is this:

We have a diesel powered industrial water heater. This $20,000 piece of equipment sucks the water out of the sea. It heats it to a delightful temperature. It then pumps it down to the diver through a garden hose, which is taped to the air hose. Now this sounds like a darn good plan, and I’ve used it several times with no complaints. What I do, when I get to the bottom and start working, is take the hose and stuff it down the back of my wetsuit. This floods my whole suit with warm water. It’s like working in a Jacuzzi.

Everything was going well until all of a sudden, my butt started to itch. So, of course, I scratched it. This only made things worse. Within a few seconds my butt started to burn. I pulled the hose out from my back, but the damage was done. In agony I realized what had happened. The hot water machine had sucked up a jellyfish and pumped it into my suit. Now, since I don’t have any hair on my back, the jellyfish couldn’t stick to it. However, the crack of my butt was not as fortunate. When I scratched what I thought was an itch, I was actually grinding the jellyfish into the crack of my butt. I informed the dive supervisor of my dilemma over the communicator. His instructions were unclear due to the fact that he, along with five other divers, were all laughing hysterically. Needless to say I aborted the dive.

I was instructed to make three agonizing in-water decompression stops totaling thirty-five minutes before I could reach the surface to begin my chamber dry decompression. When I arrived at the surface, I was wearing nothing but my brass helmet. As I climbed out of the water, the medic, with tears of laughter running down his face, handed me a tube of cream and told me to rub it on my butt as soon as I got in the chamber. The cream put the fire out, but I couldn’t poop for two days because my butt was swollen shut.

So, next time you’re having a bad day at work, think about how much worse it would be if you had a jellyfish shoved up your butt. Now repeat to yourself “I love my job, I love my job, I love my job”.