I’m no fan of billboards, but I have to congratulate Mike of Finatics for sheer gall when he put up this sign. See the plastic shark on the building behind? That’s Big Al’s, one of the biggest aquarium stores in Canada. Mike’s probably not going to get any favours from them any time soon.
So Apple sends me my replacement iBook battery. First I hear is a yellow tag on the door. I call up the DHL website, and redirect (or so I thought) the package to my work address. That was Tuesday.
Wednesday, there’s no package at work, but there is another yellow tag stuck on our door. No matter, it’ll come tomorrow (being today).
Nothing at work today either, and Catherine says that there’s a message from the DHL unclaimed parcels office in Markham. Having the old yellow bill with me, I head up to Markham to pick it up.
I thought that Purolator was bad, but DHL take teh cake. Not merely are they in the arse end of Markham, but I had to wait about half an hour to get my package, in a long queue of irate folks. Annoyance. And the thing is, DHL are right next door to Apple Canada, but the battery got shipped out of Sacramento.
The only tiny piece of amusement I got from all of this was that I used my :CueCat to scan the DHL ‘DNK’ number, and it worked. I am easily amused, but it’s all I’ve got.
hpshopping.ca really doesn’t like Francophones. If you go to the section for the HP Compaq dx2200 series, you’ll see the following:
Yup, the French version’s nearly 17x the price of the English one.
I think that Microsoft Picture Viewer is a bit overly concerned about your welfare if the picture you are looking for is not there:
Came home, said hello to the fish, and did a quick count; I was one loach down, and the CO2 generator had an orange tail …
Seems that one of the loaches had decided it was way cool to get wedged up the back of the gas generator, and couldn’t get back out. I gingerly pulled off the device from the side of the tank, and the loach fluttered off, a little dazed.
No sooner had I put the generator back did another loach zoom up and get jammed. It must’ve been told that you got a “wicked headrush, dude”.
And for this reason, loaches don’t rule the earth.
Ubuntu mounted an HFS+external drive from our Macs without complaint. This is good.
BM-Electronics swapped my ill-fated nVidia card for a shiny fast MSI ATI PCIe card with no restock fee; yay BM!
They’re rapidly becoming my favourite computer store; they always have what I need, and it always does what they say it does. It may look a bit grubby, but it’s great
Just played with QCAD for a bit, and remembered how much fun I had doodling with my ancient Amiga CAD package.
… made PCIe slots able to hold but not use AGP graphics cards? In the old days, there would have been a key in the slot to make it impossible to fit an incompatible card.
I found a picture of the bike I probably enjoyed most of all I’ve ever owned:
It was originally a 19967 Gary Fisher Nirvana, but by the time this picture was taken, the only original things were the frame. the stem, and the beautiful curved bars. Everything else was swapped out, mostly due to wearing it out from my daily commute.
It wasn’t that it was a very expensive bike. It was just right; a nimble climber, nippy through traffic, yet stable enough to be ridden home when tired.
I still have the saddle; it’s on my Brompton. I gave the bike to Eddie Moore before we left. I wonder if he still has it? He still has it.
We’ve got about about 7 more eentsy platy fry.
Goodbye:
I suddenly got a retrogaming jones on, and had a strong need to play Robotron. So I downloaded MAME and some ROMs, but no dice — every archive was missing files. Seems that to get the few games I need, I have to download a 16GB torrent of ever game that MAME supports.
My arcade game sensors withered about 18 years ago, so nothing past about 1988 registers with me. You could probably fit every pre-’88 ROM onto a couple of floppies. And it’s not like I’m not allowed to play the ancient Williams games; I have the Arcade Classics CD somewhere which has the games in licensed (but MAME-incompatible) form.
I think I’ll have to install Ubuntu for i386 on the Sempron box, as too many hardware things don’t work. At the moment, I’m stuck with unaccelerated graphics and wired etherent; the via graphics driver isn’t yet 64-bit clean, and none of my wireless adaptors have 64-bit drivers, either.
Maybe at the next release I’ll go 64-bit.
Configuring the rest of the Sempron box has been a slog. It seems that there isn’t a single wireless adaptor that works with 64-bit Linux. I might have to resort to a wireless ethernet adaptor, like the D-Link DWL-G820. They’re not cheap, but they may be the only option.
Picked up the new computer from Canada Computers yesterday. High-end it isn’t, but it’s more than adequate. It’s an AMD Sempron 3000+ (on a Foxconn K8M890M2MA-RS2H motherboard), with 1GB RAM, 80GB SATA disk and a DVD±RW drive. There was change out of $400, including tax.
It’s running Ubuntu for AMD64. While there are a few things I don’t have configured, it was all installed in under an hour. It reminds me a bit of OS X. There’s one thing it does better than the Mac; it knows about duplex printers, and assumes you want to be able to print duplex. Under OS X, you have to choose two-sided every time you print. Thanks to Davey for originally putting me on to Ubuntu. My life’s too short to mess with linux configs.
Now I need to move the old hard drive over as a spare, and fit the various cards from the old machine.
From Apple’s Battery Exchange Program iBook G4 and PowerBook G4, it looks like I’ve got one of the defective ones. It’s good that I’m getting a new battery, as I’ve noticed this one doesn’t have the life it used to.
Never had my GPS being so far out. It used to say here was 28.59742, -81.21251, but now it’s saying 28.59603, -81.21274. That’s about 150m off.
