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

Day 409

If I only wrote about important things, this would have been a good day to skip. Absolutely nothing of any consequence happened. I was busy all day, but by suppertime I was beginning to wonder if I had done anything at all. I went over to Culwell & Son, my favorite clothing store, to see if I could find something at their big end of season sale and left with nothing, feeling that I had a lot more clothes than I needed already. I went to get some groceries at Central Market out of habit, even though the refrigerator was still filled with stuff I got the last time I was at Central Market. I installed the new 100 foot roll of paper in my printer and unclogged the lines, even though I had absolutely nothing to print.

I did manage to get the trash out to the street on time. That was probably my big accomplishment for the day. On the way to the grocery store, I stopped by one of my clients for a short meeting. They've been wanting to install a camera system in their outdoor doggie daycare area, so customers could watch their dogs playing during the day on company website. The project never really got off the ground because of the expense involved in bringing streaming video outdoors. I suggested just giving an iPhone to the pet care attendants who keep an eye on the dogs during the day and let them upload pictures and movies to Facebook. The more I think about it, this is a great idea. It's cheap. It's live. And it's even better than a webcam, since you've got a real person selecting what's interesting during the day.

I need to do a practice run of my new wireless photo system this weekend. In theory this arrangement will be great for events like our upcoming Valentine's Day event at The Shops at Willow Bend. Instead of taking a memory card back to the printing team after every photo session, I'll be able to transmit pictures directly from the camera to the computer by WiFi, as I am shooting. We'll even be able to broadcast the pictures I'm taking to large flat panel screens in the store in real time. That's what the system is supposed to do anyway. We may find out that it doesn't even work. I'm curious whether the WiFi memory card is fast enough to transmit the large image files as I'm taking them without slowing down the entire process. If I'm taking 30 pictures a minute and the card can only transfer one picture a minute, it's just not going to work. Practice makes perfect though, so it's time to get started.

Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day