Day 1122

I got the Apple Lombard back today. It worked perfectly. Well, actually it didn't work perfectly. I couldn't connect to the Internet anymore. Unbeknownst to me, during the years that the Lombard sat unused in my closet, WiFi standards had changed and the built-in Airport WiFi card didn't work anymore. This was kind of ironic, since it was this computer that practically invented built-in WiFi. I don't even think you could even buy a laptop with built-in WiFi before the Lombard.

I don't want to keep kicking a dead horse, but this is just one more example of how little respect that old electronics get in today's world. Old computers get about the same amount of respect as soured milk or stale bread. It doesn't seem fair to me. Vintage guitars and amplifiers are revered by musicians. Vintage mechanical watches are often worth much more than their contemporary counterparts. Even old vinyl record albums have their fans. When I tell people that I still have a working Osborne-1, all I get are glassy stares. Nobody even cares.

I got a call from a friend today that I hadn't seen in a while.  When I rhetorically asked him what had been happening in his life since we last talked, he told me that he'd had a heart attack, was unable to work for almost a year, sold his house, and was now on permanent disability. Whoa! I wasn't expecting that. This guy was very athletic and I always thought he was healthy as a horse. Apparently, so did he until the heart attack hit him. I think that our health is much more fragile than most of us would like to admit. It was also disconcerting to realize that, unlike my friend, I didn't even have long term disability insurance. I'm not even sure it matters if you're a writer though. Insurance companies are getting pretty tough. Most of them tend to think that if Stephen Hawking can still write, then other writer's disabilities must be trivial.

The weather was much nicer today, and so was my mood. The roof is clear and dry again. The buckets are gone in the living room and the house looks more or less normal if you don't look up at the ceiling. Even the dogs stayed clean today. The only fly in the ointment was my visit to the muffler shop. I was going to get the rattling catalytic converter replaced, but when the technician pounded on both converters with a little hammer and told me he thought it was the left hand converter that had gone bad, it gave me pause. For months I've been driving around thinking that the right hand catalytic converter was the bad one. I'll have to think about this one.

Dolly is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day