Mostly Harmless

I attempted the"for the love of God, never try this"iBook hard drive upgrade this weekend. Do you know how many screws you need to remove to take out the hard drive in an iBook? Thirty, three-zero, 3 x 10, 2 x 15, ten and twenty!

The disassembly is relatively easy after you get the top plastic bit off. Just keep track of all those screws and their locations and your golden… or are you. Aye, there’s the rub.

• Round 1: won’t boot from CD to setup new drive.
• Round 2: still won’t boot after futzing with misc. connectors.
• Round 3: trying original drive — now that won’t boot.
• Round 4: got it to boot from CD, can’t see original drive
• Round 5: trying new drive again, won’t boot
• Round 6: Q: What was that popping sound? A: $525 + tax.
• Round 7: put it all back together with no HD, boots fine from CD despite blown capacitors for charging circuit (see Round 6).

Well, that was fun. But I bet that now I can put all the screws in a pile and correctly identify the location of each one.

$525 is what a Tier 3 (motherboard/HD) iBook repair will cost you at Apple. And yes, I did have a backup (hello! doing a drive swap…), and yes, it is the company’s computer.

This is a fine example of the subtitle of this web page… yes indeed. Just say No to iBook drive upgrades! (but seriously folks, a 3 gig drive… geez)

When you’re single you can take your leftovers from dinner — and the pan you cooked ‘em in — and just stuff ‘em in the fridge. Nobody will know.

The seemingly endless steam of telephone surveys foisted upon me by Dateline NBC has given me the solution to our little national dilemma: phone poll. Kill a two hour block of prime time TV, have voters call the 900 #… yadda, yadda, yadda.

You may have thought that FoodTV just clued me in to"Fowl de Cochon". It seems like those feisty cajuns have mastered the technique — nay, art — of de-boning a pig and stuffing it with, well, a Turducken. (Oh, how I wish I could find a web link…)

Just think how popular you’d be if you had one of those babies at your next holiday get together! You and your 50 friends will be eating high on the hog.

In honor of getting out of credit card debt for the first time since, um… the late 80’s… I’m going to have to buy myself a real DVD player. I’m currently using the DVD drive in my computer to watch movies, which is OK, but I have to boot back into OS 9 to run the movie player. (Darn beta OS with no DVD player, drat!).

This may sound like crazy talk, but I think that a DVD player, the Big"Gazillion Dollar"TV and Vast Array of Speakers will make for a better movie going experience than the puny 17"Computer Monitor and Smaller Array of Speakers + Subwoofer.

Plus, with a real DVD player I’ll be able to digitally capture the smutty parts of Fire on the Amazon. I’d post the pics here but my host has rules against Adult or Obscene materials.